Greenbelt Creative Director, Paul, takes you on a tour of our new-look festival village, and digs into why we’re making some changes.
For most people, going to a festival is all about adventure and discovery. And we’re sure that’s true for loads of Greenbelters, too. But at the same time, Greenbelt isn’t just any festival. We’re also a community coming back together each year, all of us making our annual pilgrimage to the bright field. It’s a staging post in our annual cycle around the sun.
When you make the same pilgrimage each year, it’s those familiar landmarks that give you the sense of homecoming that means so much. We get it, we really do. We feel it ourselves.
Which is why, for those who love the detail and the planning, we wanted to share with you some headlines from our reimagining of the festival village and our venues for this summer’s Greenbelt (equally, if you want it all to be a surprise in August, we suggest you look away now).
If you’re here though, chances are you’re a committed Greenbelter, hungry for more. On which note, there’ll be lots more to come and this absolutely isn’t intended as an exhaustive venue list, but it should give you a pretty good idea of the bigger stuff that’s changing and why.
So let’s start with what you’ve told us in the past.
The two most common threads of negative feedback we get every year in our post-festival surveys are: complaints about the programme clashes (because there’s just so much on offer at any one time); and complaints about noise spill (because our festival village is pretty compact, so what’s going on in one venue can often affect what’s happening in another).
We hear this every year and we listen carefully. While we’ve wrestled with these challenges, we have often thought to ourselves: but this is a festival. We kind of want it to be myriad and noisy. Plus, this kaleidoscopic approach fits with our theology and curatorial approach, too.
Separately though, as we – along with the entire independent festival sector – battle with exponential production costs, we have gone back to the drawing board in planning our festival village and its venues for this year, to make sure we’re getting the best value for money out of every single pound we spend.
To give you a snapshot of where we are: in 2024 we built and produced 24 separate spaces for various forms of programming. For a festival of our size, that’s a lot.
Don’t get us wrong, we’re pleased and proud to be that ambitious. But every stage costs us a lot more than it did five years ago. To be completely honest everything costs us a lot more than it did five years ago. And those costs aren’t just financial. Every stage needs power, needs generators, needs to be transported halfway across the country…. well, you get the picture.
Those environmental and financial footprints are getting heavier year-on-year. So we thought it’s probably a good time to rein things in, just a little.
So we’ve worked on a plan to do that through the autumn and into the winter, juggling two key principles: to better contain the complexity and cost of what we build, at the same time as retaining the abundance and range of festival programming we’re proud to offer to our inter-generational audiences.
Could we do this while staying true to our vision of making a space where artistry, activism and belief can collide and intertwine – a festival to believe in and belong to?
There were three key considerations we had that framed our Festival Village re-think.
One. We wanted to take this opportunity to see if there were better ways we could organise our venues to limit noise spill interference – especially from music venues to talks and spoken word spaces.
Two. We wanted to think about ways of spreading our audience more evenly across the festival village – making some of our quieter spots a bit busier and some of our too-busy spots a bit more manageable.
Three. We wanted to better pull off the trick of having ‘like’ programming clustered together more, while, at the same time, providing the variety of festival experience we know Greenbelters love, and that we believe in producing so much.
So what about the specifics of where we’ve got to? Well …
Let’s face the music
We’ll start with the big one. The Glade Arena area is going to become the home for both our two music stages at Greenbelt. So the mainstage is going to be joined, at the opposite end of the Glade arena, by the Canopy venue.
The two stages will work together. So for example, as one act finishes on the Glade mainstage, the next act will be prepped and ready to walk out on our Canopy stage. Because there’s no overlap it means we’re programming slightly fewer music acts across the whole weekend, but in turn this gives our music budget much more bang for its buck. It’s also good news for lots of you who tell us each year that you hate having to choose between our music venues. Now you needn’t miss an act.
Around the two venues we’ll have the Jesus Arms, Tank Cafe and Tiny Tea Tent all close at hand, perfect for enjoying a cuppa, cake or pint of Crazy Goat, along with the music. The Glade will also be offering the skate ramp, circus skills and other surprises. So if you loved hanging out at the Canopy while your children played nearby, there will be plenty to keep them busy.
Meanwhile the Rebel Rouser stage will keep dishing out its DIY, punk-inspired grassroots and community-driven programme in the woodland nearby.
Bringing all the music stages into closer proximity means that we will be carefully choreographing the performances on those stages so that they don’t cut across one another. This will be particularly the case with Rebel Rouser being relatively close to what will be a new music stage position at the ‘top’ of the Glade Arena.
We already know that the Glade open air mainstage (as it has been) and the Rebel Rouser stage have worked really well playing ‘against’ each other in the later afternoons and into the evening. But we will be really careful to schedule sets across the three music stages so that they work in harmony, at the same time as offering alternative experiences and choices.
The play’s the thing
We’re doing our performing arts slightly differently this year too. We’ve loved our big Playhouse venue, but we recognise that it’s taken a long time to set-up and clear-down the shows we’ve staged in it – and ages to get people in for each show. And this has meant we have only been able to schedule a couple of shows each day. Also, it’s meant that it’s sometimes been possible to queue for hours and still sometimes not get to see a show (something you also tell us in our annual survey).
So instead we’re replacing the Playhouse with two brand new performing arts spaces. A smaller indoor theatre space that we’re calling the Forum, and an outdoor theatre space we’re calling the Commons.
Every show in the Forum will perform twice, giving you more chances to see them. And we’ll be able to host more shows across the weekend because their set-up will be that bit simpler, and so shorter. The Forum will also host late-night comedy each night (something else that’s been asked for in the survey), and potentially screen films.
Meanwhile the outdoor stage will handle large audiences for circus and acrobatic shows that need extra room to breathe (and fly and spin). Both these venues will be found amongst the trees in the Dell, around where the Canopy was last year. Plus there’ll also be pop-up performances happening across the festival village to surprise and beguile you over the weekend.
Bringing back favourites and bringing together others
Elsewhere we’re going bigger. There are a couple of our venues which we know are always full-to-overflowing – with lots of you craning to hear the great speakers from way outside the tent. So this year we’re making both the Pagoda and the Hot House bigger – meaning a lot more people will be able to fit in comfortably under the canvas.
The rave new world of the Hot House is returning to the Meadow, not far from other Greenbelt faves like the Hope & Anchor, the Blue Nun and the Pagoda. And as part of embracing a slightly simpler, less complex build, there are a few venues we’ll be merging (at the same time as making the new spaces bigger than before).
The Living Room (our venue in partnership with Trussell) and yoURCafe (the family cafe venue hosted by our friends at the URC) are going to merge into a joint venue space that we’re going to call – rather neatly, as it’s about food, hospitality, inclusion and conversation – the Table.
The Den and Engine youth venues are also going to merge into a single space, which this year will be nestled in the woodland on the opposite side to the Rebel Rouser stage (off the main avenue into the glade arena from the campsite). That means the chill space will now be together with the workshop space, cranking up the vibe.
And our visual arts workshopping and networking venues, the Residency, Studio and Workshop, will also be merging into a single, larger venue at the top of the Orchard, inside the Walled Garden. This means more people can get into the workshops (which we know can sometimes be a challenge). We’ll structure the day so that we provide ample opportunity for drop-ins, led classes, and networking, across each day and into the early evening.
That’s where you’ll find the Village Hall workshop venue this year – back in the heart of the festival village, in the Orchard. The Orchard is also where you’ll find the Shelter, returning to its new location (as of last year) – again, at the beating heart of the festival.
And, having trialled it last year, instead of producing the Fringe venue, successful submissions will find their way into the programme and onto the stages of our main festival venues this year.
To some this might seem like a lot. To others… maybe not. In part it will depend on how you feel about our two music stages and the Playhouse. After all, none of us really like change. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t required.
We haven’t – as you can hopefully imagine from reading this – made any of these changes lightly or carelessly. This is about concentrating and condensing the festival experience we can build and produce.
All so that we can lessen truck haulage to site, lessen demand on generators to run, keep a handle on our costs to produce, while still providing as many characterful and wonderful venues, spaces and stages on which our artists, activists, faith leaders, poets, prophets and provocateurs can inspire, challenge, comfort and disturb us this summer at Greenbelt.
There’s no doubt it’s taken acres of our time to ponder and plan. But now that we’re done and can stand back, we think the essence of Greenbelt is still clearly intact. In fact, perhaps even more strongly. And we really hope that will be your experience in the field, too.