The new normal: leaving your tent and belongings behind at a rock festival

originally posted by: Soloprotocol
2013 T in the park, some dirty bastard had a # in my mates tent, who does these sort of things.?

I would never go to a big festival again. Smaller festivals can be just as much fun. The Arseholes are few and far between.

I have to agree. Mostly I go to a bike rally rather than a music festival and I never worry about my stuff getting nicked at a bike rally. Some of the bigger ones a few years ago started to have problems with nicking from tents etc and that was entirely down to the influx of people just turning up for the music, in cars. Since then, though, the scene has changed back to a smaller, more exclusive kind of thing that means the scrotes don't want to turn up.

originally posted by: hellobruce

originally posted by: soulwaxer
so many people just left their stuff behind: brand new tents worth hundreds of dollars, air mattresses, sleeping bags, cooking equipment, chairs, clothes,

Probably too drugged up to find where they had set up camp

I get the impression you missed out on a whole lot of fun in your youth

......and the following week they'll all be joining the latest Twitter and FB campaigns protesting about waste, plastic pollution in the oceans and blaming others for it all.

On some of my photographic forays, I can spend a whole day in one spot and, apart from my footprints, you'd never know I'd even been there. I take home what I arrive with and NEVER leave anything behind for others to clean up after me. It's a matter of respect for my surroundings and not expecting others to have to clean up after me. It saddens me to sit with my camera, framing a shot of some wild creature, with floating plastic bottle or cans stuck in the foliage in the background.

There is a FB page I am a member of which contributors use to show old movies and photos of the town, and even as far back as the late 60's and 70's (when I moved here) the one thing that stands out in the photos from that period is how clean it all is. No litter everywhere, no graffiti or tagging on every wall, everything in good order. The same, sadly, cannot be said of the town and it's surrounding area today.

a reply to: soulwaxer

I went to Glastonbury festival by accident in the mid eighties. I would never have gone deliberately. People kept asking me if I was going to Pilton Festival, the local name. I innocently followed the directions I was given, thinking I was walking to a little local festival. Arrived and was surprised to find it was the big one. Got there a week before, left a week after.

The tents and other gear left behind seemed to be mostly left by people who just couldn't cope. There were two scavengers camped on the hill. Every day they planned their campaign, choosing a new area and thoroughly searching for goodies.

One of them was just in it for the immediate experience. Sometimes he would adopt an abandoned camp for a few hours, light a fire, prepare any left behind food that took his fancy etc. His outfit was flamboyant and all salvaged from the detritus. Mediaeval style musketeer shirt, mismatched but high quality cowboy boots. Every day he looked for one of the other boots to make a pair.

The other guy was a famous Glastonbury character, very tall, silent and usually wearing a top hat. When he left he packed all his valuable discoveries into a large plastic tray and pulled it slowly across the fields with a carefully fashioned harness. He was a big guy and he really had to lean into it to get it moving. Goodness knows how he managed getting it all back to Glastonbury.

That's what it was like then. Only the occasional tent left standing among the sea of rubbish.


The young are often told the older generation have ruined everything for them. Perhaps this is their way of getting their own back, by ruining everything for the generation that comes after them. The remain voters who give 'travel' as the stock answer for what's good about the EU seem to have the same attitude. They want to consume as many throwaway products as possible, causing pollution that will affect future generations. But it's OK if the soundtrack is approved by the gangster run distraction operation known as the music business.

I never leave anything behind. I want my stuff! Never camped out at a concert though. Most I went to that we're over a few days, people were in RV's, obviously not left behind, never seen tents.
I can see how they are drunk, stoned, the concert ends and they just wanna get away, stuff they all chipped in on for the show, none wants it now, none of them want to pack it up, so it's who cares just leave it.
Very lazy and wasteful though.

I never leave garbage either. I clean as I go, collecting it into one pile or in a bag, if no trash cans around, can't stand sitting in litter. I need my area to be tidy!

a reply to: soulwaxer

The first Isle Of Wight festival was a cover for illegal gravel extraction. Having tried and failed several times to get permission to sell the valuable gravel just under the surface of his land, the owner hit on the brilliant idea of having a festival and digging and shipping out the gravel among the chaos.

He hired six security men and gave them a scrap car each to live in. They arranged the cars in a circle with a fire in the middle.

After the festival, as usual, it was a high proportion of spaced out people who stayed behind. Several of them found a quiet stretch of beach and made shelters to live in.

Among the detritus of the festival someone found a box full of harmonicas. He handed them out to the beach dwellers.

It's said the pharmaceutically enhanced harmonica symphonies heard along that beach were amongst the most beautiful music ever heard in the Isles of Britain.

After a weekend abusing your body, the last thing your brain can handle is tidying up after yourself. Just jump in the car and get back home a sap. Where a warm shower and bed are waiting. I know it's wrong, but I blame the parents. Most of the tents get recycled for people who really need them

To be fair, many of the tents/equipment are damaged and I can see why people wouldn't go to the effort of trying to pack up a broken tent or an unusable airbed. Also many festivals have strict exit times and if you're not off the site by the required time, the stewards will escort you from the site, whether you have packed your gear or not. I left a tent at Download once that was broken because a drunk person fell on it on day 2. It was one of the pop up ones and because of the damage, it wouldn't fold back up, so I couldn't have transported it even if I had wanted to.

Another year, I specifically bought a cheap tent and airbed (also notorious for getting damaged and being impossible to re-pack, but I handed them into the charity area before I left, so that they could be re-used.

I never, ever leave rubbish, a roll of black bags is always in my kit and I make sure I don't leave anything. As for the rest of my camping equipment, I always take that with me as well. My old stove and whistling kettle are over a decade old now, and still in perfect working order

a reply to: woodwardjnr

To look at this in a positive light absolutely it is great these people donate to the needy, its a shame they have no clue they are !

I wonder how much does go the needy though ?... As there are many scavengers and the most wanted job at these places is the clean up for obvious reasons ....

a reply to: hopenotfeariswhatweneed

Hedge, ditch just before a police roadblock. A plethora of discarded substances.

A friend was driving slowly in the queue of traffic towards the entrance when the back doors of the van in front opened and a tent fell out onto the road. My friend jumped out and picked up the tent. The van disappeared off into the traffic and despite his best efforts he couldn't catch up with it.

When they started setting up camp he thought they might as well set up the found tent. He unrolled it and found two kilos of hash. I was going to say of course he immediately handed it in to the police, but we're not meant to lie on ATS.

a reply to: Kester

Happy days.......Love it ......

a reply to: soulwaxer

Thought the exact same thing after the last summer jam here, last weekend.
Funny thing is, people without tickets are forbidden since this year to take a walk at the lake, because "too much was stolen". That´s a reason for many people that this is the end of this festival, at least here in germany/cologne. They should move to the netherlands anyways, then the police has no reasons to disturb paying reggae festival visitors because of smoking a spliff.

But, if they are feared(we know it´s about the money, nothing else) that something is stolen, why do the visitors throw away everything that maybe could be stolen before? They leave really everything, it´s a shame!
Otherwise, there are smart kids from around the area, their mothers will have to wash a lot, but this kids will have camping equipment(amd lots of other stuff) galore, maybe they open a second hand shop, so millenial mommies can buy the equipment for their spoiled kids, for the next festival...

Typical arrogant entitled little maggots.

Everything just handed to them on a plate, no appreciation or respect for the value of money. As far as these little #s are concerned they have it all coming to them.

They didn't work for the money to buy those tents. Nor did they work for the cost of the overpriced tickets. All just handed over willingly by mummy and daddy to get the little turds out of the house for a week end. Cheap at twice the price no doubt for a couple of days of peace from the little darlings.

It used to be one of my burning ambitions to make it to Glasto some year. Came to realize that isn't such a good idea. No desire to sit in a field full of thousands of disrespectful idiots.

The worst kind is these posh little trainee stockbroker types, go to Glastonbury and buy a big wacky furry hat and suddenly they are cool and spontaneous. Of course they leave their bloody tents behind, they have no use for a tent in their lives, they will just buy another one and leave it behind next year. Picking up litter is too much like manual labour and is of course beneath them.

a reply to: TheFlyOnTheWall

Wow...I find it hard to believe the author spent numerous paragraphs discussing how hard a tent is to pack back up...as if this is some kind of credible excuse.

Seriously, anyone who's spent more than a couple days camping knows, if the situation gets ugly (weather / whatever) returning a tent to the bag...just remove the poles, stuff the tent into the bag and strap the poles on the outside of the bag. Done.

No, the people who leave this stuff behind are just plain lazy, and there is NO excuse! They are part of the throw-away culture which is so prevalent today. Just leave it...someone else will deal with it. Disgusting.

Heck, in the mid-80's through the mid-90's I spent more time in a tent outside in the backcountry than I did anywhere else. I still have that tent...and it made it back into its bag tens of thousands of times, poles and all.

Unreal.

a reply to: soulwaxer

I go to a festival every year.

It's one of the heaviest heavy metal festivals there is, and is called Bloodstock. You would have thought, that given the fact that the musical genres covered by Bloodstock are MUCH more devoted to chaos, destruction, carnage, and insanity from a thematic point of view, that there would be more trash generated per head, than there would be at the kind of hippy dippy, happy clappy affair that Glastonbury is.

While it is by no means the case that the campgrounds at Bloodstock are left pristine after a festival, the fact is that it is not the norm to see THIS sort of desolation at the end of the festival at Bloodstock. You see, Bloodstock is more than a festival. It is a community of metalheads, who get together once a year to have a blast, rock out with their proverbial male chickens out, and be together as one, to shout, scream, and mosh their appreciation for the genres of music that we all love the bones of.

Many of the festival goers cannot afford to leave their kit behind, for many reasons. Purchasing kit once a year would add hundreds of pounds to the cost of going, a prohibitive amount. Second of all, leaving kit lying about at the end of the festival will add pounds to the cost of a ticket next year. Bloodstock is a very reasonably priced festival, and so we metalheads would like to to stay. It's organised by the fans, for the fans, so we tend to look after the event, and one another, to keep costs down, and keep the festival crowd real, rather than elitist. Essentially we love the event, we love one another, and we all want to see the same smiling faces in the queue next year, we all want to have somewhere to go next year, and we all want to be able to afford next years ticket.

Like I say, it is by no means the case that no trash is generated by Bloodstockers. There is, a huge amount. It's also true that there are leftover tents, but not to the degree in the video. We don't leave our kit lying around for someone else to deal with NEARLY as much as is shown in the video above, and further to that, most of us make an effort to tidy up our beer cans and our bin bags into or next to the industrial sized bins that are spotted around the camps, and I personally make every effort to ensure that I leave the ground I am camped on, exactly as I found it, save of course the compressed grass underneath my tent.

I got my first tent when I was eleven or twelve years old, and I only bought a second one when the poles snapped and shredded both skins. That was about nine years ago now. I have no intention of throwing away, or replacing my current tent. It pitches in seconds, takes no time at all to pack away, is easy to clean and to maintain, and is just a perfect tent for the purpose. It also would have cost seventy quid if I had bought it off sale. As it was I got a deal on it, not much of one, but enough to value it and look after it until such time as it fails me.

The same goes for all my gear, my bedroll, my sleeping bag, my pegs, my lantern, torches, clothes, bag, everything I take with me comes back home, other than toilet paper, beer, and snacks. That's how it should be. Sure, we are not making camp in the pristine wilderness of the highlands of Scotland, or on an environmental mission to the Galápagos Islands, but that does not mean that we should be crapping on our doorstep.

With me, things are different. You see, it's not as if I leave home to go to a rock festival once a year. Bloodstock IS my home, and the rest of the year is simply working away for me. I do not crap on my doorstep, and I know plenty of my fellow Stockers feel the same way. It's a real shame that the same sense of community is not fostered amongst Glastonbury goers.

This is so rude, if you can pack it in, you can pack it out. Clean up after yourselves, or these events will be banned from every location. No city wants to have to deal with the aftermath of a music festival, when the visitors disrespect the land and the community and leave it like that.

Clean up after yourselves! Golden rule of camping anywhere!

-Alee

I guess some folks don't like camping.
I love it, my wife hates it.
So if I'm alone or with one of the kids, it's the bike, groundsheet, tarp and some ropes. Bags, food and my trusty Swedish army stove.

If the Mrs is coming, then we need to hitch the trailer to the landrover to carry the huuuuuge tent, wind breaks, multi burner stove, tables, chairs, toilet, beds, fridge, larder, bbq and wardrobes.

I'm not joking. It's like a Wilbur Smith book where he describes some 19th century safari.

Remember the tea parties? Remember the daily nonstop demonization of this group by the media? One of the things they were known for it was picking up all the trash after their events.

a reply to: TrueBrit

Well said.

Being responsible isn't all that hard. And it's critically important if one wants to enjoy places and things in the future.

a reply to: TheBulk

Not so with the Occupy Wall Street crowds though.

Oh, the irony!