A free house with every six Glastonbury tickets

By Leah Simpson
Posted: 2010/06/20

GUY KENNAWAY reveals how Britain's most popular music festival, Glastonbury, has affected his rural home in the neighbouring village of Pilton

WHEN I bought my house in Pilton, Somerset, in 2006 the estate agent failed to tell me that every summer 173,000 people would be camping at the bottom of my garden.

He regarded the Glastonbury Festival as an unmentionable blight and naively hoped I didn't know that Pilton was the closest village to the world-famous music site. In fact, the festival was one of the reasons I bought the house. The other reasons were that the village was charming and my children went to Millfield School, just seven miles up the road.

The house had been fitted with elaborate security arrangements, not just alarms and floodlights but bars on the windows as if there was a scary threat to be countered.

The garden was barricaded and all the gates long locked shut with rusty padlocks. I learned as I removed all these defences that they had been set up in the Seventies and Eighties against an invasion of antisocial festival-goers who terrorised the village.

I heard stories of outhouses being ransacked and squatted in, and even of residents getting up in the morning and finding a stranger in their bath (the last place you would have thought any of the festivalgoers would be comfortable). My neighbour also told me about the time they cut off the electricity and pillaged the village at will.

These were not reassuring tales for me now I had paid £1million for a house at the centre of what appeared to be a community that should be twinned with Gaza City.

Yet I banked on this blight receding rather than intensifying and it has done precisely that. The biggest change from those anarchic early days is that festival organiser Michael Eavis now encircles his farm with a seven-mile-long, 16ft-high aluminium wall, which I love for many reasons: notably, it enables him to keep festival-goers not in possession of a ticket out and, more importantly, those with tickets, in.

Along with a small well-drilled army of uncompromising security guards posted at points all over the village, it means Pilton has less traffic and fewer pedestrians during the week of the festival than at any other time of the year.

During the revels all outside traffic is banned. I am issued with a car pass, which the guards on the road block at the edge of the village practically salute when they see.

As the festival has grown up so too has its audience and the daft hippy "hedgers", as they were called around here, have been gradually pushed out by the organisers and replaced by people like me: middle-aged, well-off and attempting to be "groovy" for no more than four days a year.

My phone always rings off the hook from early June with requests from friends I hardly see the rest of the year wanting me to get them tickets and a bed for a night, or four, and not surprisingly I am particularly popular with my teenage nephews, nieces and godchildren.

>F THE weather is fine and someone of whom I have actually heard is playing I will wander from my kitchen after a congenial supper with friends to take in an hour or two of the music at full throttle.

It is not just me who has noticed that this festering heap of trouble has matured into a well-organised, middle-class-friendly, world-class entertainment event. Those with properties that abut the site have even developed club-class style accommodation businesses, charging punters thousands of pounds to stay in mud-free comfort.

Often they do a deal with the festival to get a bunch of backstage passes but we residents know that all they do is get you access into another field where there are a further 8,000 people with the same backstage pass. The real backstage passes are never seen.

This year I converted an outhouse into a studio flat.

I advertised for tenants mentioning that it was in Pilton, within the area that is supplied with free Glastonbury tickets. I only had interest from people who were attracted by this extra.

There are some diehards in the village who still harbour great resentments against the festival and Mr Eavis. They are mainly those who were traumatised and abused in the old, chaotic era and whom Mr Eavis has failed to get back on side.

They complain about the festival's huge consumption of water, about mud on the road and about the noise. It's the careful work of a few livid people in Pilton that has resulted in Bruce Springsteen being forced to stop at midnight. Frankly, it's a job well done to shut that man up after four hours but I can easily put up with noise until midnight when I take into account the benefits.

With his Glastonbury riches Mr Eavis has carried out an impressive personal and public building programme around Pilton.

His own new house, which looks like something out of a book by Tolkien, is of dubious taste but it suits him and is a monument to his irrepressible determination, which has now brought Pilton a new village hall (locally called the Pilton Guggenheim), as well as a new cricket pavilion, playground and some well-designed starter homes.

THERE are always signs of Mr Eavis's philanthropy at work: right now I see they are adding what looks like a sun deck to the Parish Council Chamber, which is not the usual type of project undertaken by your average little village Parish Council.

The future looks rosy. Mr Eavis is passing the festival on to his beautiful and astute daughter Emily and her new husband John, who will continue to ensure it matures and enjoys greater success.

When I come to sell my house I am confident I will be boasting that it lies within the Glastonbury festival catchment area and that it comes with six free tickets, which are getting harder and harder to come by.

Who knows, if I wait long enough, I may even be advertising: "Six Glastonbury festival tickets for £2million (plus free house)."

Glastonbury Festival, Worthy Farm, Pilton, Somerset, June 25 to June 27.