Worthy Farm, Pilton, September 1970, and a stage built over a spring.

Glastonbury Festival takes its name from the Somerset town, but it has always been held a few miles away, on a working farm. Wikipedia gives the full title as the Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts, known colloquially as Glasto, and describes it as a five-day festival held near Pilton, Somerset, in most summers, with dance, comedy, theatre, circus and cabaret alongside music. The site is Worthy Farm, which Mixmag described in September 2025 as a functioning cattle farm.

The festival started as a single day. Wikipedia says the inaugural event at Worthy Farm was the Pop, Blues & Folk Festival, hosted by Michael Eavis on Saturday 19 September 1970, and that Eavis decided to stage it after seeing an open-air concert headlined by Led Zeppelin at the 1970 Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music, held at the nearby Bath and West Showground. The billed headliners, The Kinks and Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, were replaced at short notice by Tyrannosaurus Rex, later known as T. Rex. The BBC’s Glastonbury archive, in a page captured in 2011, calls the event the Pilton Pop, Blues and Folk Festival, lists Stackridge, Keith Christmas and Marc Bolan among the performers, and says the entrance ticket included free milk from the farm.

The following summer produced the structure now tied to the festival’s image. Wikipedia says the Glastonbury Fair of 1971 was instigated by Andrew Kerr and organised with the help of Arabella Churchill and others, and that it featured the original Pyramid Stage. Conceived by Bill Harkin, the stage was a one-tenth replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, built from scaffolding and metal sheeting and positioned over what dowsers call a “blind spring”, an underground body of water. The 1971 event was filmed by Nicolas Roeg and David Puttnam, and along the way the name shifted from Glastonbury Fair to Glastonbury Fayre, the title also used for a triple album.

The early years were irregular. Wikipedia records a small, unplanned event in 1978, when a convoy of vehicles was directed to Worthy Farm, and a revival in 1979 by Churchill, Thomas Crimble, Kerr and Eavis, staged for the Year of the Child.

One family, one farm and a pyramid rebuilt more than once.

The festival became a regular fixture in the 1980s, with the Eavis family at the centre. Wikipedia says that in 1981 Michael Eavis took back sole control, and that the festival has since been organised by Eavis, the site owner, through his company Glastonbury Festivals Ltd. A new Pyramid Stage went up the same year, built from telegraph poles and metal sheeting, and designed as a permanent structure that doubled as a hay barn and cowshed in winter. In 1985, Wikipedia says, the festival outgrew Worthy Farm and the neighbouring Cockmill Farm was bought.

The pyramid has had to be replaced more than once. Wikipedia says the Pyramid Stage burned down just over a week before the 1994 festival and that a temporary main stage was put up in time, and that a new Pyramid Stage was introduced in 2000, the year The Glade and The Left Field areas also arrived. Broadcasting changed hands in 1997, when the BBC took over televising the event from Channel 4.

The organisation stayed in the family. Wikipedia says Eavis ran the festival with his wife Jean until her death in 1999, and then co-organised it with his daughter Emily Eavis. Speaking on the BBC’s Sidetracked podcast, as reported by BBC News on 10 June 2024, Emily Eavis said that through the 1990s her parents always described each festival as “the last one”, planning to stop at retirement age, and that the event became a permanent fixture only after Jean died in 1999. “My dad was like, ‘Listen, let’s keep it going,’” she said. The same report said Michael Eavis is still involved, while the bulk of the organisation, including booking the main stages, is handled by Emily Eavis and her husband, Nick Dewey.

Outside partners have come and gone around the family. Wikipedia says that in 2002 Festival Republic, a company formed by Live Nation and MCD, took on the logistics and security of the festival through a stake in the festival management company, and that the relationship ended in 2012. Wikipedia also credits Emily Eavis with designing The Park, an area that opened in 2007.

A stage shape, a farm name and a year off.

A music or film festival usually carries two identities at once. One is permanent: a name, a mark and a small set of colours or letterforms that stay the same from year to year and appear on the website, on signage at the site and on anything the organisers publish between editions. The other is annual: a poster, a key image or a short-lived graphic system made for a single edition and replaced when the next one is announced. The permanent mark has to sit comfortably beside each new poster without competing with it, so it is often simple, compact and reproduced in one colour, while the yearly artwork is free to change style, medium and mood entirely.

At the site itself the identity becomes practical. Wristbands and passes carry the name and the year, often in a colour that changes with each edition or ticket type so that staff can read them at a glance. Stages, screens and venues are given names that appear on maps, timetables and directional signs, and those names can outlast any single poster, becoming part of how regular visitors talk about the event. Wayfinding has to work in daylight and after dark, in crowds and at a distance, which pushes it towards large type and strong contrast. Merchandise, programmes and digital listings repeat the same elements in smaller sizes. For designers, the useful lesson is the split itself: a fixed core that builds recognition over many years, and an annual layer that gives each edition its own character and lets the event refresh itself without losing its name.

The fallow year as part of the identity.

Glastonbury’s calendar includes deliberate gaps. Wikipedia says the festival has been held most years since 1981 except for “fallow years” intended at five-year intervals to give the land, the local population and the organisers a break, and lists 1988, 1991, 1996, 2001 and 2006 as the scheduled ones. The Guardian reported on 17 October 2010 that the festival would skip 2012 because the London Olympics would drive up demand for portable toilets and police, and that a festival spokesman, John Sherlaw, said 2011 had originally been earmarked for the break. Michael Eavis told the paper that a year off seemed sensible.

Later gaps were forced or planned again. Wikipedia lists 2018 as a fallow year, and The Guardian reported on 21 January 2021 that the 2021 festival was cancelled, after the 2020 event, with Michael and Emily Eavis calling it “another enforced fallow year”. In the BBC report of 10 June 2024, Emily Eavis said the festival would probably take a fallow year in 2026, explaining that it gives the land a rest and lets the cows stay out for longer. Mixmag reported on 29 September 2025 that the festival would return to Worthy Farm from 23 to 27 June 2027, and that Eavis had called the 2026 break “overdue”.

The visual constants come from the site rather than from a published brand manual. The Pyramid Stage, in its 1971 scaffolding form, its 1981 telegraph-pole form that sheltered cattle in winter and its 2000 replacement, gives the festival a shape that predates any logo. The farm name carries the rest: the BBC archive, the festival’s organisers and the trade press all place the event at Worthy Farm, and the festival’s company name, Glastonbury Festivals Ltd, keeps the plural.

For a design guide, Glastonbury Festival shows how a recurring event can draw its identity from one piece of architecture and one family farm, and even turn a year off into part of its story. Compare Roskilde Festival, a Danish summer festival of the same era, and Primavera Sound, a city festival with its own name and calendar. For this guide we use pasture green, farm track and sheet metal with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Glastonbury Festival’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.