Glastonbury Festival: A Glimpse into the Future of Urban Control and Queer Culture

Deep in the English countryside, amid a landscape of picturesque rolling pastures and ancient standing stones, sits a corner of Manhattan. A fragment of the 1970s Meatpacking District as it looked five decades ago, spirited through space and time to bucolic Somerset. This weird slice of pre-gentrification New York is an elaborate architectural stage set: the NYC Downlow, a pop-up nightclub created every year since 2007 for a long weekend of drag and dancing at Glastonbury Festival.

The festival is packed with architectural narratives and spatial design

Glastonbury, the world's largest greenfield festival, is no stranger to architecture. Alongside its programme of music, circus, theatre and cabaret, the festival is packed with architectural narratives and spatial design. Alongside the Downlow, there's Sweet Charity, a spaceship-like tropical disco venue designed by Cody Dock rolling bridge creator Thomas Randall-Page; a spiral pavilion constructed from reclaimed timber and mycelium; until recently, tensegrity towers by structural engineer Morgan Trowland, and, of course, the iconic Pyramid Stage designed by local villager Bill Boroughs.

The Downlow was the world's first specifically queer venue to open at a music festival

Co-founded by artist and music producer Gideon Berger, the Downlow was the world's first specifically queer venue to open at a music festival. It morphs in appearance every few years, reviving different 70s street fronts with each manifestation. One time a yellow taxi cab appeared to have crashed into the Downlow's upper storeys. Another year, slabs of meat hung alongside scantily clad, smouldering performers.

Queueing has become a central part of the Glastonbury experience

For all its inclusive politics, however, getting into the Downlow is hard. The capacity is only around 500, which, with 200,000 people on site, means the queues have grown exponentially with the venue's fame. It's not just the Downlow where queueing has become a central part of the Glastonbury experience. The festival's countercultural past, entangled with the traveler community, environmentalism and the peace movement, has gradually given way to creeping managerialism.

The ever-more present crowd-control techniques now deployed at Glastonbury Festival follow the exact same coercive logic that is shaping our streets

The whole design of Glastonbury's contemporary infrastructure is increasingly centred on one-way systems and other large-scale crowd control tactics. For festival managers queues are useful, keeping slow-moving audiences contained with little opportunity for unexpected behavior. For everyone without a VIP wristband, however, the show can feel like a big party you're always waiting to get into.

Security is fencing off beaches, safety is teaching people to swim

The justification for all these control tactics is always safety. In Glastonbury, as across Britain, every new form of urban management promises to make us safe. But safety and security are not the same thing. Security is the attempt to eliminate risk, however marginal that risk may be and regardless of any negative consequences. Safety is designing the social systems and support structures which mitigate and deal with risks and mishaps as they arise.

The festival is not an escape from the real world then, but a snapshot of what is to come. It's a microcosm of contemporary UK urbanism taken to its next logical step, a place in which the creep of systems of control are omnipresent. The NYC Downlow may offer an architectural glimpse of an American past, but the queues and surveillance that surround it are a vision of Britain's urban future.