Is It Safe To Go To A Festival?

Before Covid, there was no stopping their popularity with the whole family. But what about now? Tanya Pearey reports

- Tanya Pearey

Festivals were never a truly stress-free trip for the seriously health-conscious – all that mud, all those people in close proximity and a visit to those Portaloos… Add the risk of Covid into the mix – with the knock-on effects of insurance issues for the organisers – and it’s little wonder that some live events, like Glastonbury, have been cancelled for the second year running.

But festivals could be as ‘safe as Sainsbury’s’, according to Rowan Cannon, director of festival organisers Wild Rumpus, who was reporting to a House of Commons Select Committee on the live music sector earlier this year. She said that organisers could adapt programming and put infrastructure in place to change the way festivals were run. And now that the vaccination programme has advanced so quickly, many festivals have the green light to go ahead this summer.

There’s no doubting the popularity of festivals pre-Covid. Tickets for well-known events sold out within days and a fifth of us said we would happily ditch our annual holiday to head to a festival instead, says research in 2019 by Barclaycard. Although that was pre-Covid, the reasons cited then for the popularity still apply – the rising cost of trips abroad, uncertainty around Brexit and hotter UK summers. The same survey found that around a third thought attending a festival enhanced social skills and confidence.