The Guide #249: As Glastonbury has a fallow year, here’s why more much-loved culture should down tools

In this week’s newsletter: The festival always comes back fresher after allowing Worthy Farm to recover from its yearly musical extravaganza. Star Wars and Charli xcx could learn a thing or two In any other year this week’s Guide would be arriving into your inbox from Worthy Farm, home of Glastonbury festival. Not in 2026 though: for the first time since the Covid pandemic, which poleaxed two consecutive years of the festival, Glasto is a no-show. The reason? It has booked in one of its occasional fallow years, which allows the dairy farmland on which the festival sits a chance to recover from a half decade of camping, trampling and moshing. It also gives its organisers a rare window to recharge their batteries and plan for the festival’s future, and its detractors a year off from declaring its headliners “the worst ever”, again. For long-term Glasto-goers, it’s always bittersweet when the fallow year rolls around – the last was in 2018 – but this year it does feel like a bullet dodged, given that the event would have landed bang in the middle of a truly dangerous heatwave (my face, and many others, would have turned a previously undiscovered shade of beetroot). And moreover, the fallow year often works a treat: when the festival returns the year after, it tends to be re-energised, with new stages, stronger lineups and well rested people running the show. Continue reading…