Reading Festival 2023 review: a volunteer’s experience
A highlight on the UK’s festival calendar is Reading. As one of the most popular festivals, you’ll have heard about it: but whether you’ve heard good or bad things is a whole other story!
I attended Reading Festival for the first time in 2023. At 24, I was a little bit worried about being older than everybody there, but I needn’t have been anxious about it.
As a first-timer, I figured I’d write a review for the festival, sharing my thoughts and opinions on the site, attendees, music and camping. It wasn’t what I expected, so I hope it’ll be useful to others who aren’t sure what it’ll be like.
Just to note, as with most of the festivals I go to, I attended Reading as a steward with Oxfam. It’s a great way to attend festivals; however, as I didn’t camp in the general campsites, my feelings may be different to an actual punter.
Ratings
Music: 5/5 • Activities: 1/5 • Audience & atmosphere: 3/5 • Site: 3/5 • Accessibility: 5/5 • Facilities: 5/5 • Value: 3/5 • Volunteer experience: 3/5 • Overall: 3.5/5 (ex. volunteer experience)
About Reading
Reading is an overnight music festival. It’s normally over England’s August bank holiday weekend (the last weekend in August).
Reading Festival is one of the oldest music festival in the world. It began its life as the National Jazz Festival in 1961, before shifting to Reading in 1971. Since then, it’s continued to evolve towards what it is today!
Nowadays, Reading is run by Festival Republic. It’s twinned with Leeds Festival and both have the same lineup of music, with artists moving between the two festivals each day. You’ll see its connection to Leeds clearly within the branding.
It remains one of the UK’s biggest festivals, with a capacity of 105,000 in 2023, and everyone in the country is sure to know it!
A note on volunteering
I attended Reading as a volunteer with Oxfam. The volunteering aspect definitely affected how I felt about the rest of the festival, and therefore I’ll also be discussing the volunteer experience as part of this post.
To give you a brief overview of festival volunteering with Oxfam, it works like this: in return for three eight hour shifts, volunteer stewards get free access to the festival, meal vouchers and a separate campsite with showers, hot water and electricity for phone chargers. It’s a great system full of friendly people and I’ve really enjoyed the festivals I’ve attended with them so far.
I’ll talk about how volunteering at Reading compares to other Oxfam festivals later on, in case this interests you!
What is Reading normally like?
Reading is all about the music. You’ll see it in its lineup, which is full of big name acts as well as smaller established artists.
Reading has a major focus on headliners and hosting some of the most popular artists in music. This is so important to the festival that, since 2021, they have two main stages. Their commitment is that the two main stages never have a conflicting schedule, so there’s a 5 to 10 min break between every main stage act: just enough for attendees to run across the field!
It’s a good enough idea – twice as much of the popular music, right? However, honestly, I wasn’t so sure about it. It means that the sets for each act are super short. In 2023 most sets across the stages (until the evening) lasted 30 mins, with some of the early acts only having 20 mins. The headliners were only on stage for 1 hour 20 mins!
On the subject of headliners, the fact that there’s two main stages means that there are also two headliners. I liked it as it means there’s multiple big arena acts every night. However, there’ll only be a 10 or so min gap between them. Therefore, to avoid the stampede, fans leave the first headliner a couple of songs early to get to the other main stage. I found it a bit sad as a lot of people leave the earlier headliner during the last and normally best song.
Young crowds
Although I’ve written a lot so far about the music, most people know Reading for one main thing: its crowd.
Reading has a reputation for attracting primarily school leavers, in the 16 to 18 age bracket. It’s super young, and, as a result, is not exactly renowned for its audience…
We’ve all seen the photos of Reading’s campsites left with all their tents, or the rubbish on the floor. We’ve all heard about the rowdiness in the campsites as well, or the many tent fires. For many attendees it’s their first festival experience, so they’re missing gig etiquette and often have poor camping skills too. The number of tents I saw falling over at Reading 2023 was astounding!
Weather at Reading 2023
As with all festivals, the weather was a big influence on my experience.
At reading in 2023, the weather was pretty mixed. Occasionally there was sun, but most of the time clouds were above, with regular showers throughout the day. None were particularly heavy or destructive, and the arena never got muddy, but it was a regular sight to see festival goers don their ponchos in unison during a performance.
Average. That is all I have to say!
Reading 2023: the various aspects
To summarise my experience, I’ve rated Reading 2023 in a bunch of categories, which I have summarised below:
- Music: 5/5
- Activities: 1/5
- Audience and atmosphere: 3/5
- Site: 3/5
- Accessibility: 5/5
- Facilities: 5/5
- Value for money: 3/5
- Volunteer experience: 3/5
Overall score: 3.5/5 (excluding volunteer experience)
If you attended Reading in 2023, let me know if you agree with these ratings! I go into each part of the festival below.
Music: 5/5
Reading is all about the music. It undeniably excels in this area!
The lineup this year was fantastic and covered multiple genres. Foals, Sam Fender, The 1975, The Killers, Imagine Dragons and Billie Eilish headlined. There were also plenty of acts throughout the day which I enjoyed seeing, most notably COIN, Bombay Bicycle Club, Matilda Mann and Holly Humberstone.
However, one thing I didn’t like was how short the set times were for each act. Most sets throughout the day were only 30 minutes long, which seems way too short for me, and you can’t dive deeply into any of the songs or branch out from what’s most popular.
Activities: 1/5
If you strip back the music from Reading 2023, to be truthful, not much is left behind. There was an alternative tent, which had live comedy; and one of the stages showed films at night. But other than that, there weren’t many activities or events going on.
I wish there would’ve been some other activities to keep us occupied. As great as the music was, sometimes I just wanted to do something else.
Audience and atmosphere: 3/5
I had very low expectations of the audience at Reading Festival. After attending Boardmasters (which attracts a similar audience) a couple of weeks before, I had expected a young, aggressive, pushy crowd lacking in etiquette and politeness.
Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised by the audience. The campsites, yes, are occupied by mainly the school leaving crowd, and it wouldn’t be somewhere I’d like to camp. However, day ticket holders are of a much more varied age range, and they make up a significant proportion of the audience. It mellows the crowd out at each act.
I accepted that I wouldn’t be going deep into the crowd, and the audience was mostly fine in the sections I stood in!
Site: 3/5
The arena at Reading Festival was compact and circular. The two main stages, on either ends of the arena, were only a five minute walk apart, with the other stages to the side. This made it super easy to get around.
However, by comparison there wasn’t a lot of stuff in the arena. I didn’t find the choice of food vendors and stores to be inspiring, and there weren’t even that many stages.
Also, given the arena’s size, music from the main stages travel. It gets pretty annoying when you are trying to watch performances at the smaller stages, as you can sometimes hear what’s going on at the main stages.
Accessibility: 5/5
Reading Festival is very accessible. Its location near the centre of Reading makes it easy to reach from the south of the country, with easy train connections.
As with any festival of this size, there were the typical features to help disabled people enjoy the music, like accessibility platforms and camping. They also had a BSL translator on one of the platforms, which I always like to see!
The arena itself was flat and compact, making it easy to access.
Facilities: 5/5
The toilets at Reading were surprisingly nice in the arena. Those blocks of toilets you sometimes get at Christmas markets and longer events? That’s what they had. Actual water; loo roll in every stall; sinks to wash your hand: what a dream!
They had enough stalls that I only had to queue a couple of times. It was a common sight to see cleaners at the toilets.
I never went to the toilet outside the arena, in the campsites. However, these didn’t look quite as nice and were mainly portaloos and long drops.
There weren’t showers available for everyone, which was disappointing but expected.
Value for money: 3/5
It’s difficult to say whether Reading 2023 was value for money. I’m sure that if you totalled the cost of buying tickets to see the headliners at their concert and compared it to the festival ticket, the festival would come across as great value for money.
However, the ticket doesn’t come cheap. You also don’t get as much for it, with minimal activities to keep you amused.
Volunteer experience: 3/5
As I volunteered at Reading 2023 with Oxfam, I figured I’d give the volunteer experience a rating too. After all, the crew experience can be quite different to that of the punters!
Oxfam’s campsite was pretty big and spacious, which I liked. However, there were no toilets available in the Oxfield, so you had to walk to the main crew toilets. It wasn’t a long walk but it was annoying.
Particularly annoying was the shortage of showers. There were possibly 14 stalls for the whole of crew camping, which I estimated to be 1500 to 2000 people. This meant, unless you showered late at night, there were always long queues.
Shift-wise, I think Reading was pretty good. Shifts were mainly in the arena, at the gates or at several campsite hubs. My shifts were mainly at the arena or arena entrances, which worked great as we could hear a lot of the music and make a swift exit at the end of the shift! I worked on the arena entrance twice as well; as a very busy area, this made the shifts go fast.
The other thing that has got to boost the volunteer experience is the staff boat. As the crew camping is over 30 mins walk from the arena, there’s a boat to shorten the walk. It’s got a disco ball and everything! Although I never actually saw the disco ball in action (just some Adele and Aqua being played on my way home), it was definitely a highlight for me and added some pzazz to the journey!
Reading 2023: summarising the experience
Reading Festival pleasantly surprised me. Within the arena itself, the audience was better than I expected, and I enjoyed the music too.
Will I be back? I’m not sure – there are plenty of other music festivals I’ve never been to. I’d be interested in trying Leeds in the future, to see what the difference is.
One thing is for certain: I would never go as a weekend punter. I have heard too many bad things and don’t fancy camping with such a young age group!
Have you been to Reading and if so, what was your experience? Let me know in the comments!
