More details have emerged of what to expect from the new Victorian seaside pier at Glastonbury 2019.
Last month, festival boss Michael Eavis revealed that the 60-metre pier is one of the surprise additions to the festival when it returns in June.
The iconic festival’s line-up for 2019 was revealed earlier this month – with Stormzy, The Killers and The Cure all taking top billing on Worthy Farm.
But away from the music, fans can expect one of the festival’s strangest installations to date.
Eavis revealed the unusual attraction as he attended a new show by Joe Rush, an artist whose elaborate works have previously featured at the festival. He explained that Rush will be building “an enormous pier” for this year’s festival, which will be aptly called “Glastonbury on-sea”.
Now, Rush has shared images of his design as well as explaining what it will feature when it makes its debut in The Park area.
It's going to include Punch and Judy, crazy golf, sticks of Glastonbury rock and much more ? #Glastonbury2019 https://t.co/nZSsz4Gay0
— Robin Murray (@Rob_Murray92) April 2, 2019
“I approached Michael about the idea during the fallow year,” Rush told BristolLive. “He loves seaside attractions and often talks to me about the seaside rides he enjoyed going on as a child.
“Growing up in Hastings, I have always had a great love of the seaside too. The idea was then given the green light and we got to work.”
Rush has previously designed a number of attractions on site at Glastonbury, including the sculptures that top the Pyramid Stage, a replica of Stonehenge made out of cars, Joe Strummer Memorial Tree and and the last festival’s addition of Cinemageddon. Now, he’ll be bringing a number of other attractions with the pier – including a wheel of death which daredevils will perform stunts on throughout the festival.
“I’m really excited about this project – it’s going to be absolutely huge,” Rush continued. “When completed it’s going to weigh 160 tonnes so putting it all together is a massive job. We have a team to build it as well as a team to put all the entertainment on it. Different bits of it are being built all over the place but the majority being made in Blandford Forum.
He added: “It’s going to have everything you’d expect to find on a pier, including Punch and Judy, an arcade, carnival shows, a fortune teller, a wheel of death and more. Basically everything except the sea.”
It isn’t the only eye-catching installation that fans can expect this year. It was previously confirmed that an “evolving show in the sky” is coming to the festival as a replacement for Arcadia.
A spokesman for Arcadia said: “Same field – new world! We are currently wrestling giant bits of machinery.
“A vast new project is taking shape at Glastonbury that will lay the foundations for a new site-specific landscape and an evolving show in the sky over the next five years”.
Speaking of other improvements being made to the Glasto site, Emily Eavis told NME last year: “I think [in The Park] there will be a couple of radical switches around and a bit of a re-jig. I was walking through The Park last night, it was 2 in the morning, I was looking up the hill at all the venues, and they were all banging and really going off.”
“I had this idea all of sudden we could do [in The Park] that would be really radical, and thought ‘that would be really cool’. It’s not the sort of thing you could do in a year off, but two gives us a bit of time.”
Emily added: “The thing about the festival is that it’s run by the most devoted team of people, and they really put everything into it. Everyone is committed to making it as brilliant as it can be. It’s quite moving when you think about the amount of people that make it happen. I think they’ll all appreciate a break.”
All tickets for Glastonbury 2019 are currently sold out, but a resale for unwanted tickets will take place on Sunday April 28.