From a Dairy Farm to 200,000 People: How Glastonbury Became the World's Most Important Music Event
One pound, free milk
The story starts with a farmer watching Led Zeppelin.
In 1970, Michael Eavis — a Somerset dairy farmer with 150 cows and a mortgage — drove to the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music at the nearby Bath and West Showground. He saw Led Zeppelin play an open-air set. He drove home to Worthy Farm in Pilton and decided he could do something like that in his own fields.
The Pilton Pop, Folk and Blues Festival opened in late summer 1970, the day after Jimi Hendrix died. The original headliners — the Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders — pulled out at short notice. Tyrannosaurus Rex, not yet famous as T. Rex, stepped in. Fifteen hundred people showed up. Admission cost one pound, which included free milk from the farm.
Nobody present could have imagined that this modest gathering on a working dairy farm would become the largest greenfield music festival in the world, a cultural institution that shapes British identity, and an event that has donated millions of pounds to charity over five decades.
The free festival years
For most of the 1970s, Glastonbury was sporadic. There were a few impromptu gatherings in the Worthy Farm fields after 1970, with performances from Ginger Baker and Jimmy Page among others, but nothing annual or organised.
The festival found its footing in 1979, when the Glastonbury Fayre team staged a three-day event around the Year of the Child. Twelve thousand people came. Tickets cost five pounds. Peter Gabriel headlined. Arabella Churchill — granddaughter of Winston Churchill — became a key organiser and established the Children's World Charity, beginning the festival's long tradition of giving money away.
In 1971, the year after the first festival, organiser Andrew Kerr had moved the date to coincide with the summer solstice — a tradition that would continue on and off for years. Bill Harkin built the first Pyramid Stage that year. David Bowie performed.
The eighties: politics and prosecution
The 1980s transformed Glastonbury from a hippie gathering into something with purpose. In 1981, Michael Eavis partnered with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. The festival became a fundraiser for CND, giving the event a political backbone that distinguished it from every other music festival in Britain. A second incarnation of the Pyramid Stage went up, and the local council issued the festival's first official licence.
This didn't mean the establishment was happy about it. In 1984, Michael and his wife Jean Eavis successfully defended five separate prosecutions related to the festival. In 1987, the council refused to grant a licence, a decision overturned on appeal in May — just weeks before the gates were supposed to open. Running Glastonbury in its early decades required equal parts musical vision and legal tenacity.
The nineties: mud, Britpop, and the fence problem
By 1990, the festival had a new name — Glastonbury Festival for the Contemporary Performing Arts — and a capacity of 70,000. Tickets cost thirty-eight pounds. It was, by any measure, a proper festival now.
Then came the era that cemented Glastonbury in the national imagination: the mid-nineties Britpop explosion. Oasis, Pulp, Blur, and Radiohead all played Glastonbury in 1994. Channel 4 broadcast the festival on television for the first time. Suddenly, Glastonbury wasn't just a festival. It was a cultural event that the entire country watched.
The nineties also brought legendary mud. British weather being what it is, the Pilton fields turned to swamp with reliable regularity, creating images that became iconic — wellington boots swallowed to the knee, tents floating in puddles, performers playing to crowds that looked like they'd crawled through a trench. The mud became part of the brand. If you went to Glastonbury and came back clean, you hadn't really been.
But the decade also brought problems with overcrowding. Thousands of people climbed the perimeter fence or cut through it. By the 2000 festival — which drew an estimated 200,000 people despite a much lower official capacity — the situation was untenable.
The super-fence and going legitimate
In 2002, Eavis invested one million pounds in a new perimeter fence — a serious, industrial barrier designed to end the era of fence-jumping. The decision was controversial. To many, the old fence (and the ease of climbing it) was part of Glastonbury's free-spirited identity. Eavis argued that the fence wasn't about excluding people — it was about safety, and about making sure the festival could continue to donate to charity rather than absorbing the cost of tens of thousands of non-paying attendees.
The fence worked. By 2003, 100,000 tickets sold out in 24 hours. Glastonbury had crossed from countercultural event to national institution — one that people actively competed to attend.
Building a city
As Glastonbury grew, it developed the infrastructure of a small city. The numbers are staggering: by 2019, the festival's capacity stood at 203,500 people, requiring temporary roads, water systems, electricity grids, medical facilities, and sanitation for a population larger than most English towns.
New areas kept appearing. The John Peel Stage launched in 2005, named after the beloved BBC DJ who had championed emerging music for decades. The Park area opened in 2006 with its distinctive ribbon tower. Block9, the after-hours area known for immersive art installations and club-level sound systems, arrived in 2007. Each addition expanded what Glastonbury could be — not just a music festival but a temporary civilisation with its own geography, economy, and social rules.
In 1998, Tony Bennett inaugurated the "legends slot" on the Pyramid Stage — an afternoon performance reserved for heritage artists who might not headline but who command universal respect. The slot has since become one of the most talked-about bookings each year.
The moments that defined eras
Every decade has its Glastonbury performance that people remember where they were for:
Jay-Z, 2008. When Jay-Z was announced as the Saturday night Pyramid Stage headliner, Noel Gallagher of Oasis publicly criticised the booking, saying the festival was "wrong" to have a hip-hop artist headline. Jay-Z opened his set by walking onstage playing "Wonderwall" on a guitar, then tossing it aside and launching into his own catalogue. The moment was electric — a musician responding to gatekeeping by walking through the gate and owning the stage.
Stormzy, 2019. The Croydon grime artist became the first Black British solo artist to headline the Pyramid Stage. His performance — which included a Banksy-designed stab vest, a ballet sequence, and a segment where he brought out a choir — was widely regarded as one of the greatest headline sets in the festival's history.
David Attenborough, 2019. The naturalist appeared on the Pyramid Stage to present a climate change message, receiving a reception usually reserved for rock stars. He urged the audience to cut single-use plastic. Glastonbury subsequently banned single-use plastic bottles from the site.
The charity machine
What makes Glastonbury genuinely unusual among major festivals is that it gives its money away.
The festival supports three long-standing charity partners — Oxfam, WaterAid, and Greenpeace — alongside dozens of smaller causes. In 2024, Glastonbury donated a record five point nine million pounds, up from three point seven million the previous year. The 2025 edition raised four point two million in direct payments plus an additional nine hundred thousand pounds through a Crowdfunder raffle.
Michael Eavis has also used festival profits for local causes, including social housing projects in the Pilton area. The festival employs hundreds of local residents and contracts local businesses. For the surrounding communities, Glastonbury isn't an annual disruption — it's an economic engine.
The fallow years and the future
Glastonbury takes a "fallow year" roughly every five or six years — a year with no festival, to allow the farmland to recover. The fields are still a working dairy farm for the other fifty-one weeks of the year. The fallow years are a reminder that Glastonbury is, fundamentally, a farm that happens to host the world's biggest music festival.
Emily Eavis, Michael's daughter, has taken an increasingly central role in programming and running the festival alongside her husband Nick Dewey. The transition from founder to next generation is one of the things that makes Glastonbury unusual: it's not a corporate property. It's a family farm with a stage on it.
Michael Eavis is in his late eighties now. The festival he started with fifteen hundred people and free milk has become something that defines British summers, launches careers, and raises millions for causes he believes in. It didn't happen because of a business plan. It happened because a dairy farmer saw Led Zeppelin and thought, I could do that in my field.
The milk's not free anymore. But the spirit of the thing — that improbable combination of mud, music, and generosity — hasn't really changed at all.