The first Glastonbury event took place in 1970, a very different proposition from the vast modern festival at Worthy Farm. Over the following decades, the festival repeatedly expanded, paused, changed infrastructure and absorbed new musical cultures.
The 1980s and 1990s helped turn it from countercultural institution into a national ritual. By the 2000s, the festival had become a global broadcast event without entirely losing its reputation for eccentricity, activism and surprise.
Its history is not a straight line of growth. Fallow years, licensing debates, weather, security changes and shifts in the music industry have all changed what the festival feels like. The constant is the strange combination of enormous scale and a mythology built around one Somerset farm.