2020 - No Blue parking and No Gazebos

Please rethink this - families especially will suffer because of this.  In bad weather how are they able to get shelter or gather ?  Just bought one for the last green man and it was great in the rain.  We were all thinking of settlement, but have to reconsider... Also dragging kids and belongings from the orange car park - awful.  

Very bad decisions here I think...

No shelter for the whole of the Settlers week is going to be tough.  Invested in one and found it invlauable for the past couple of years and for the price I paid - there is no way am I leaving it behind as we are told others are supposedly doing.  

Hey guys, we completely understand the frustration caused by these decisions - but it's not one we've taken lightly or without thought. 

This year Settlement parking took up 75% of what was previously Blue Car Park. Due to the increasing popularity of the Settlement and the increasing number of customers using accessible facilities and car parking, we predict that their cars will take up all of the available parking space in 2020. Blue Car Park was close to Family Camping, so we have introduced a new area of Family Camping closer to Orange Car Park and the Park and Ride drop off. If you park in Park and Ride there will be very little walking. 

In regards to gazebos and event shelters, we now recycle and reuse all left behind camping equipment apart from these and camping chairs, and they are a major source of campsite landfill. However our reasoning is not only environmental, we have not increased the capacity of the festival for a couple of years and have no plans to do so for 2020, however people have gradually been bringing bigger tents and bigger gazebos to set up their campsites. This has added pressure on the amount of space generally available to camp, particularly for those arriving later in the weekend. We asked whether people would support a ban in our audience survey and a large majority of people agreed it was a good or great idea.

We do really do value our loyal Green Man-ers like yourselves and do hope this won't stop you attending the festival. 

GM

It may work fine for people who just come as a family but my experience is that there are lots of groups where some parts of the family/friends come for Settlers, and others arrive on Thursday morning to ensure they can find camping space with their Settler friends. But that will now involfting loads of gear all the wy from the Orange Car Park

I suspect people will simply buy bigger tents (if they can afford to) meaning just as much space is taken up.

Truly shite decision, sorry Walter.

I don't believe it has anything to do with landfill but more to do with squeezing more people in.

For reasons beyond our control, we were just about the last to leave - in fact not until 4pm (sorry!)  we didn't see any gazebos left in the family area - none at all ... 

The decision is really strange and surely made by people who have never camped for a week in Wales.

If you are going to employ extra bodies to police people bringing gazebos into the festival, then why not instead employ those bodies to encourage people to take their gazebos home, if indeed there are huge numbers being left, I witnessed very few being left behind and if anyone has ever left a Coleman Event Shelter behind I'll plait piss. 

What's the ruling on a tarp and four poles?

Hugely disappointing 

One of the joys of the festival is being able to reconvene back at bascamp in the rain and listen to the sounds of the festival whilst kicking back with friends. Equally, it's not practicable from a logistics perspective when you need to set up camp for 4-7 days. Are we all meant to now have to buy a new awning structure which falls within the rules? 

I went to Download Festival a few years ago (another festival with a reputation for being a bit wet) and they had a strict no gazebo rule. Security were patrolling campsites demanding anybody who had one to take it down immediately.

If this is going to be properly enforced then Green Man will have to do the same otherwise there will be those who ignore it and bring a gazebo anyway camping next to pissed off people who respected the policy and left theirs at home.

Perhaps they wouldn’t have thought this necessary if people didn’t put up such ridiculously over the top campsites. I’ve been going 9 years and year on year this gets more ridiculous. Including people gettingn there on Monday and police taping off large areas of the settlement for people to arrive later with huge gazebos, and using multiple gazebos for one group. i Do have some sympathy with them, albeit it’s an lying as we only bought ours this year and it is a small one!

if we're outlawing large canvas structures held up by poles, presumably that means they have to take down that shitty far out tent and replace it with a proper outdoor second stage with decent sound

https://www.ipetitions.com/petition/stop-the-ban-on-event-shelters-at-gr...

I confess I may have been one of the people who asked for 'NO GAZEBOS' in the survey, and after a proper think admit I was wrong to do so. I think I was taken in by the phrasing of the question, and my personal vendetta against the annoying families/groups who take up the same amount of space with eight people that sixteen do elsewhere due to indulgent/selfish use of gazebos/spacing.

Whilst I still dislike the latter practice, it is ultimately a key part of Green Man's vibe for families to be set-up nicely and comfortable, and it's like the chairs issue - while there are plenty of 'I'm alright Jack' types who insist on setting up their stupid sofa thing in the middle of a jam-packed Far Out tent or occupying half the Walled Garden with their picnic blanket, those worst-case examples (which do stick in the mind and rankle my hungover and sleep-deprived psyche to a fair degree) don't really ruin things to any great extent. Getting too heavy-handed about it wouldn't help. 

Personally I'd be very happy if they assigned gazebos to be allowed only in the family/quiet areas, they can all fight it out for space and us flower-of-one's-youth light-packing types can get a monopoly on the bits near the stage

Think it's fair to say I don't envy Green Man having to set policy on these kind of things, keeping the vibe of 'best festival ever' for families, pissed youngsters, hedonists and music-lovers alike must be effing hard

Decathlon offer .. may be of interest to some ;-)

https://www.decathlon.co.uk/living-r-base-arpenaz-l-fresh-id_8397099.html

Or one of these - https://www.campingworld.co.uk/en/gb/Kampa-Tarp-300-x-300cm/m-18437.aspx?PartnerID=4125&msclkid=60fb5122197a1c37c3780ca9713b39a7&utm_source=bing&utm_medium=cpc&utm_campaign=Finch%20Shopping%3A%20Camping%20World%203402745%20UK&utm_term=4578228980313758&utm_content=54375UK%3A%20Kampa%20Tarp%20300%20x%20300%20cm - couple of windbreaks, bish bosh job done. Ironically it's footprint is probably larger than a gazebo.

it's all getting very heated on FB

where GM have just copied and pasted the explanation they posted here

Maybe they could limit use of gazebos to one per camp and the family camping and respectfully request campers to self regulate this ie... if you want Green Man to retain its vibe, don’t take the piss. Frankly we moan on here about some of the millennial behaviours (see other threads) but some of the selfish behaviours that lead to this are nothing to do with millennials. A small effort from regular attendees may make an impact here

be interesting to see how fast early birds sell out this year

lots of folk on FB saying they won't be bothering this year - many of them representing big groups

no doubt the thing will still sell out

but i wonder what impact gazebogate will actually have on the pace at which that happens

I honestly don't have a problem with the gazebo ban. I can see why people like them, and I was enviously eyeing the Coleman Event Shelters last year, even looking online to see how much they cost. But there were so many of them in the campsite this year. We went down for Settlers and it felt crowded even on the Monday afternoon. We pitched our tent, and then next morning someone had constructed a shelter right in front of one of the doors to our tent, which felt really cramped - there were guy ropes everywhere. I get that people want somewhere to shelter, but last year it felt like there were lots of little "villages" popping up everywhere: you couldn't really walk through them, they took up space that could have been used for tents, and everywhere felt a bit crowded. Some groups also had more than one shelter, and is this really that different to the police tape land grab that annoys so many people (including me) - I mean, it's just swapping a proper shelter for the tape but essentially the same sort of thing...

I mean no offence to anyone! Just my thoughts. And I get that they are useful for families. We are a family of 3. But we have never taken a gazebo in 6 years of going with our daughter and 15ish years of Green Man overall.