By Samantha Hare

Have you got a ticket for this year’s Glastonbury Festival? Make sure you pick up your copy of the Free Press! 

As a regular attendee of Glastonbury Festival, I’ve always eagerly read the Glastonbury Free Press. Every year, two editions of the daily paper are printed overnight for the Thursday and Sunday of the festival. But this isn’t just your standard newsheet: they are printed by an original Heidelberg printing press! 

The paper is handed out to festival goers throughout the site; the content is topical and as it happens at the festival, reporting on the bands from the previous day and events that took place on the colossal magical site. This all started in 2013 with the concept of ‘written by the people, for the people’.

Last year I finally visited the location where it all happens! I took some photos and asked the printing team how it works.

The team works ridiculously hard: they get the plates at the end of the day on Wednesday and Saturday and print 30,000 copies of each issue overnight! The team said they can print roughly 1,500 newspapers an hour, so the machines run all night. The papers are available from the early hours and are distributed site-wide in time for you to read with your first campsite coffee of the day! 

The Glastonbury Free Press is printed in three passes – one pass in black ink for each side and then one additional pass in red ink. The printing blocks are produced in Bristol before being transported to Somerset. The text is set using linotype hot metal typesetting, a method invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler in 1884.

The original 1953 Heidelberg cylinder press weighs five tonnes. These historic machines were prevalent in the printing industry for most of the twentieth century. Their maker Schnellpressenfabrik Heidelberg had invented an automated sheet-fed press mechanism. Before its arrival in the 1930s, every sheet of paper had to be individually fed into printing machines by hand.

After printing, the papers are folded on a rebuilt 1990 Stahl T52-4X folding machine. The team said it is very loud, and it’s always a relief once the folding is complete and they are able to hear their own thoughts again!

The press is located in a tent near the theatre and circus area. You can go and see all of this for yourself on your next trip to the farm!

Find out more about it and download previous editions here: https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/download-the-2024-glastonbury-free-press/

More about the history of the festival itself, from 1970 to present: https://www.glastonburyfestivals.co.uk/history/

All images by Samantha Hare