Longleat Safari and Adventure Park has confirmed it’s had talks with the organisers of Glastonbury about hosting the world-famous music festival in 2018.
Michael Eavis, founder of Glastonbury Festival, has been looking for potential sites to hold the event during the fallow year – one year in five when the festival does not take place to give the farmland (and local community) a chance to recover.
“They have talked to us on a very, very preliminary level,” Longleat CEO Bob Montgomery told
Attractions Management. “We’ll explore it. They’re thinking of 2018, so we do have some time to at least look at it, but it’s very, very speculative.”
Rumours started circulating that Longleat, which boasts an Elizabethan country house, 900 acres of landscaped gardens, a safari park and zoo, would host the event after Eavis was spotted at the attraction. Longleat is less than an hour’s drive from Eavis’s Somerset farm where the festival is traditionally held.
Still, Montgomery is cautious about the feasibility of the proposal and will need to carefully consider the impact it would have on Longleat’s heritage-status site and the animals that live there. The closure of the park for a week or more during the busy June period would also be a consideration. The festival of contemporary performing arts is the largest in the world, attracting 135,000 people last year.
“We get approached for things like this regularly, but it’s pretty difficult to imagine we could do something this huge, especially with everything else that we have to keep in balance,” he said.
Longleat is currently celebrating its 50-year anniversary with a number of special events, and is also working with Forrec on a 10-year masterplan that will redevelop the attraction to increase capacity and help it diversify its offer in the future. Longleat currently attracts 950,000 visitors per year.
As part of the birthday celebrations, pop star Elton John will be playing a concert at Longleat this June, the first music concert held at the attraction since the Rolling Stones played there in the 1960s.
“We have sold all 15,000 tickets for the Elton John concert, but there’s a big difference between doing this and doing a music festival,” said Montgomery. “It’s a step for us to see if we can do a show like that once or twice a year, and if we can that’ll maybe open up some other options for us.”
For more on Longleat’s 50th anniversary and plans for the future, don’t miss the next issue of Attractions Management.
