Hang on, is this Ascot or Glastonbury?
All hail the new British Season, which sees the festival crowd merging with the upmarket racegoers, says Hannah Betts
Unusually, those two great titans of the English summer – Royal Ascot and the Glastonbury Festival – will be going head to head this week: one kicking off on Tuesday, with the going good, good to firm in places; the other on Wednesday, mudslides not anticipated. Ten years ago, no one would have batted an eyelid at this coincidence. Ascot, to quote My Fair Lady, was for “Ev’ry duke and earl and peer,” Glastonbury for the rockingly unwashed. This year, however, the clash has rendered a good many revellers frustrated. For, where once the audiences for these events were so poles apart as to be never the twain, today the intersection in the Venn diagram of those seeking to attend both is ever-expanding. As one old Etonian laments: “It’s rather a sore point. My body will be in the Royal Enclosure, but my heart will be larging it in front of the Pyramid Stage”; not a sentiment Lerner and Loewe would have set to music. All hail the all-new British Season: a sweaty melting pot in which the hoi polloi are muscling in on class acts, while you are as likely to see royalty raving as quaffing Bolly in Her Majesty’s Box.
For despite the fun had on Twitter over the myriad titles offered on Ascot’s drop-down ticket menu (“Captain The Jonkheer” included), this year the meeting is making a concerted grab for festival types, provided they smarten up. Much has been made of its dress code now stretching to jumpsuits (note: jump not boiler). However, it will also be offering DJs, “street” food stalls, and what a High Court judge might refer to as “popular music combos”, entertaining carousers into the night. Old-school attendees will be delighted to learn that these attractions will be safely confined to a young person area, namely “The Village Enclosure,” and have been approved by Johnny Weatherby, the Queen’s representative. It marks the first new enclosure at the Berkshire course since the Five-Shilling Stand opened in 1908, innovation being permitted once a century. The organisers may have deployed the dread phrase “pop-up summer scene,” however, oiks/ whippersnappers have not been put off, with tickets doing a roaring trade, not least on Saturday – a sell-out during which the Village’s 4,500 capacity will be met.
Dress codes will still apply: suits, shirts, ties and hats are de rigueur; strappy dresses banned; no wellingtons or bandanas allowed. Nevertheless, togs and gee-gees apart, one could be forgiven for imagining oneself at Glasto. Juliet Slot, the course’s canny commercial director, remarked in March: “It will be our take on a festival feel – but done the Ascot way – aimed at a slightly younger demographic. We believe in something for everyone and this was a gap we wanted to fill. It keeps us modern, moving forward.”
Meanwhile, Glastonbury has been heading in the opposite direction – justly satirised for becoming ever older and more upmarket. Mick Jagger was on the money (plenty of it) when he referred to the occasion as the “alternative Ascot” back in 2013, the occasion of their Glastonbury debut.
Now firmly on the establishment circuit, it’s a positive “Classtonbury” teeming with toffs and/or the highnet worth; Princess Eugenie was snapped wandering around in wellies last year. An outlay of £10,000 would buy you a family-sized yurt complete with showers, shagpile rugs, private lavatories, four-posters, a chef and martinis on tap. “A bell tent for a bell end,” scoffed a pal, before revealing
You’re on to a winner: hands up if you’re into festivals or the horses... Oh, wait, you go to both?
that he stays at a nearby manor house belonging to a school pal.
This year, friends of mine who are attending have agreed to address each other by surname, as so many are called “Rupert”. Meanwhile, word on the street – said street clearly being Mount or Jermyn – is that there will be a fair few attendees from the Beaufort Hunt. A regular recalls that last year’s Green Fields resounded to the cry: “Have you heard, Dickie’s become chairman?”
And Somerset’s finest is by no means alone. Where festivals used to attract provincial teenagers with trench foot and suppurating acne, today it’s more hampers and tinkly laughter. Witness The Archers’ token posho Freddie Archer last week losing his virginity at the Isle of Wight festival.
Increasing numbers also boast aspirations to be “cultural”, in the wake of Bill Clinton billing Hay as the “Woodstock of the Mind”.
Port Eliot is especially cherished in this capacity, a west London love-in transplanted to Cornwall, peopled by middle-class types clad in their grandfather’s military garb, or rigged out as sexy fairies. This year, “the UK’s finest festival for fashion” will feature style stalwarts Zandra Rhodes and Barbara Hulanicki amid so many Henriettas in Hunters.
What we have, in effect, is a new summer season. Where once this capitalised interlude meant denizens of the shires massing on London to marry off their daughters and keep their wives entertained, today it’s all about emaciated Notting Hillbillies with “influencer” careers, wafting around the Serpentine bash in Erdem. “Although, actually,” notes one arch social commentator, “Port Eliot and the like are no less about marrying off one’s daughter. She will just have a lot of sex first – probably in the vicinity of the dance tent.”
It means that we less lofty, nonemaciated types might also get a piece of the action, if not at the Serpentine then at country-house opera, or the local big house’s arts jamboree. As Lydia Slater, deputy editor of that beau monde bible Harper’s Bazaar, observed in its June edition: “It is not merely that the guest lists have changed … The hallowed Season itself, once deemed to begin with the Chelsea Flower Show and end after Goodwood (or Cowes, for those not grouse shooting from August 12th) has also been adapted to suit modern taste, vastly expanding beyond the traditional sporting and horticultural fixtures.”
Ms Slater notes: “Our social pages are as likely to record the goings-on at Glastonbury as at Glyndebourne.”
Good job there’s likely to be less mud this week – it wreaks such havoc on the ball gown.
‘The race meeting is making a concerted grab for festival types ... if they smarten up’