Grounds were left full of discarded camping gear and garbage in the aftermath of the Reading and Leads Festival.
Over ten thousand festival-goers gathered at the grounds over the bank holiday weekend for the much-awaited festival, with performances from Stormzy, Tyga, Post Malone, and more.
And while most of them left with fantastic memories and maybe a hangover (or three), many of the raucous crowd left the grounds looking like a disaster area.
One security worker stated that: “You don’t even want to know what I’ve seen.”
“We’ve had soiled underwear – always women’s underwear weirdly, never men’s – and condoms, used and unused.”
Lily Robbins, the sustainability manager of the festival, has said that cleanup “always takes time because we want to do it properly.”
She added that: “We have loads of different teams working together this year to actually get the site back to what it was looking like before we arrived.”
She also said that while charities will take some of the tents left, many of them will undergo an “incredibly lengthy” recycling process.
“Unfortunately, tents are one of the worst things to try and recycle,” she said.
Managing director of the Festival Republic, Melvin Benn – which runs the Reading and Leeds Festival – stated that he had aimed to offer the younger crowd a chance to live ‘freely’ for one weekend and not think about Covid-19.
He said: “Just walking out in the arena today in Reading and earlier this evening in Leeds, I think what the exciting thing about it is, is that they come into an environment where they actually just don’t have to think about Covid.”
“And actually, it is one of the things I wanted to create, a space where people can come and feel relaxed and comfortable and not looking over their shoulder.”
“It is a feeling of absolute joy because they really have – I don’t know if ‘abandoned their fear’ is the right term – but they are living freely.”