How big is Glastonbury Festival? Putting the immensity of the festival site into context

By Judy J. Beasley Last updated Jun 14, 2022

If you’ve ever been to the Glastonbury Festival or seen it on TV, you may have been amazed by the mammoth scale of the site. The Avalon Valley near Pilton is normally a dairy farm for most of the year, but turns into one of the biggest music festivals in the world for five days – but how big is it?

On average, the sleepy village of Pilton has a population of around 1,000 – but in late June it becomes a huge, bustling metropolis as around 210,000 people descend on the countryside. The population of Glastonbury Festival dwarfs neighboring towns in the Somerset region, including Taunton (60,479), Weston-super-Mare (76,143) and Bath (101,106).

The festival actually becomes the fourth largest city in South West England, with only Bournemouth (514,000), Bristol (467,099) and Plymouth (264,000) seeing more people. The area of the festival site is approximately 1,100 acres (that’s the equivalent of over 500 football fields).

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An aerial view of Glastonbury Festival 2011

The festival site is surrounded by eight miles of fencing and includes at least 100 stages and venues, over 500 food stalls, over 100 bars, over 4,000 restrooms and over 40,000 trash cans. To get an idea of the magnitude of the event, you can use this site to compare the size of the festival site to where you live.

Simply search for a village, town or city and the website will overlay an outline of the festival site above the desired location. Keep in mind that this overlay isn’t even the entire festival, just the ground inside the main fence, and doesn’t include the huge parking lots and off-site camping options.

Using the tool, we can see that the festival is roughly comparable in size to its nearest town – Shepton Mallet. It is also roughly the same size as its namesake, the town of Glastonbury.