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‘Poor management leads to fatal crushes’: how Glastonbury and others are dealing with big crowds
After disasters such as Astroworld and scary bottlenecks at last year’s Glastonbury, Emily Eavis and crowd experts explain how they’re trying to make events safe
In April, London Assembly member and Conservative mayoral candidate Susan Hall echoed Metropolitan police concerns about the potential for a “mass casualty event” at Notting Hill Carnival this year, and in May, the Mail on Sunday published an anonymous Glastonbury whistleblower’s allegation that the festival is a “disaster waiting to happen … Worst-case scenario, people are going to die.” Away from the doom-mongering and poor public awareness, crowd safety experts have a great deal of knowledge to draw on; they’re putting to bed pseudo-scientific ideas such as “mob mentality” or human “stampedes”, which are tired myths dating back to the 19th century, and long since debunked. Photograph: Ben Birchall/PACharli xcx’s recent headline show at the new Lido festival series in London’s Victoria Park left some fans disgruntled – with a sold-out crowd of 35,000 squeezed into a space ill-equipped to handle the number of attendees they had sold tickets to.
Or read this on The Guardian
