Emily Eavis has revealed the changes she has implemented to Glastonbury 2025 to try and make “as much space as possible” for punters.
The iconic festival will return to Worthy Farm in Somerset between June 25 and 29, ahead of a fallow year in 2026. Headliners are Neil Young, Rod Stewart, The 1975 and Olivia Rodrigo on the Pyramid Stage, while Loyle Carner, Charli XCX and The Prodigy will perform on the Other Stage.
Now, with just over two weeks left until gates open, Glastonbury organiser Emily Eavis has shared details about what changes have been made for 2025. Speaking as part of the Sidetracked podcast with Nick Grimshaw and Annie Mac, Eavis shared that the main adjustments have been made in a bid to make more space for visitors.
This will include a revamp of the south-east Shangri-La area, meaning it will now have more of an emphasis on nature and provide some empty space for people looking to take a break from the busy stages.
“There are a few little changes. Shangri-La has got creative this year, which is exciting. They’re going completely opposite to anything they’ve done in the past. They’re going full trees and green space,” she said.
She also added that organisers have added a whole extra field to that part of the site called The Dragon’s Tail, which was formerly reserved for camping crew members. “Kindly the crew made some space for the public there. It’s important, especially in the south-east corner because it gets particularly busy at night.
“If you don’t want to go into the busy bits, you can go into Dragon’s Tail and literally sit on a hill and see it all. It’s just space. It’s a bar and a field. It’ll be really good if you want to go in and get out quickly, or if you don’t want to go in fully.”
Eavis then compared this new addition to when The Park Field was introduced as an area for people to “just sit down” and take a break from the crowds – describing it as “the best thing we ever did”.
In another bid to create more space, Eavis said that 2025 will have “a few thousand” less people attending than in previous years. This was done to see if it would make a noticeable “impact on some of the busier times”, and to keep people safe around the site.
The decision comes following the festival securing approval to increase capacity in 2020 – increasing it from 203,000 in 2019 up to 210,000 the following year.
Also new for 2025, there has been more space introduced around The Other Stage. This has been done particularly due to the huge number of people who will be wanting to see Charli XCX perform there as headliner on the Saturday night.
“The Other Stage has quite a lot more space now for the audience. Obviously there is a lot of talk about Saturday night… [so] we’ve been managing that,” Eavis said. “We’re trying to make as much space as possible, but the thing I always want to say to people is that you can go elsewhere. There are so many things happening at any moment.”
Also in the interview, Eavis encouraged punters to use the Glastonbury app in the run-up to the festival and highlight which artists they are planning on seeing while on-site. This, she said, will allow organisers to keep track of how busy certain areas will be throughout the event, and help them make these spaces as safe as possible.
“The app was really accurate last year and we were getting feedback from the people planning what they’re going to see,” she explained. “It’s useful for us from a crowd perspective. We can say we have red, orange and green [areas], and if something is looking like it is going to be [busy], the field might have to be closed. It’s a normal thing to do when something is busy and it keeps it safe.”
The comments on the Sidetracked podcast come just days after debate arose about the safety of the festival. An insider spoke to Metro and said that it could be “a ticking time bomb” due to the immense number of people who could be flocking to see certain artists this year.
“How has it [Glastonbury] survived this long without a major disaster? It’s got to be a mixture of luck and a mixture of goodwill, the jewel in the UK’s crown is actually something of a ticking time bomb,” they told the outlet.
In response, a Glasto spokesperson said: “As always, Glastonbury 2025 will have a robust, dynamic crowd management plan in place, with crowd safety paramount at the Festival.
“Our team works year-round on crowd management, which is at the forefront of all decisions and planning for the site and artist bookings. Our proactive crowd management team monitors data (including from the official Glastonbury app line-up planner) for information on potential act popularity for weeks in advance of the Festival and develops a comprehensive crowd management plan accordingly.”
Organisers spoke about the emphasis on safety and space management earlier this year too, when they dropped new information about the layout of the site.
Alongside the aforementioned changes to Shangri-La, the Silver Hayes and The Glade areas will also be bigger this year, and there is now more public camping space in Pylon Ground, as well as two new toilet blocks at Park Hill.
As for areas that have been scaled back, Oxlyers has now been reduced to allow for more room in the Other Stage Field, and public camping space has decreased in Bushy Ground, South Park 2, and Pennards. Find out all the changes to the layout here.
As for the fallow year planned for 2026, Eavis has said that there will be a new initiative next summer to plant tens of thousands of trees around the site.
“We’re planting 30,000 trees next year. I’m really excited about it,” she said on Sidetracked. “We bought some land on the outside of the site and we’re going to do a big planting project. It’s the kind of thing you want to do on a fallow year – plant trees, plant hedges and really restore the wild side of the surrounding land.”
In other Glasto news, last week the festival’s full stage splits and timings were shared and led to speculation about the numerous mystery slots on the line-up.
Curiously, there’s an unknown act called ‘Patchwork’ on the Pyramid Stage between 18:15 and 19:15 on Saturday night, and rumoured names for this slot include Pulp, Ed Sheeran, Yungblud and Mumford & Sons. If Jarvis Cocker and co. do pop up, it’ll coincide with the 30th anniversary of their Glastonbury headline slot in 1995, and come in support of their new album ‘More’.
