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2002 > 2002 Reviews > Kidz > Kidz Field

 Kidz Field


Review
This year the Kidz Field here at Glastonbury Festival is the most colourful, cheerful and chilled place on the planet. It should be a prerequisite for anyone and everyone to pay at least one visit over the weekend, firstly because it is right next to the free showers and then because it is sure to make the world's worst and weariest forget that we are all grown up. A sign near the spectacular mock medieval entrance gate says, "It's never too late to have a happy childhood" and whilst this sentiment is to encourage donations to a children's charity it seemed there were lots of large people inside enjoying a happy childhood by proxy. For me, I was revisiting, not my own childhood, but those lost years when my own kids ran around in this same green space dressed in the latest state of the art home made fancy dress from the "Sticky Fingers" tent.

"Sticky Fingers" is still there; the little loos for kids-only are still there, the helter-skelter, pirate fort, swing boats, roundabouts, Punch and Judy, lost kids corner, no smoking policy, story tellers, tireless enthusiastic entertainers and juggling workshops are all still there, all the same as they ever were and all brilliant. But as we know, Glastonbury Festival is progressive in all the best ways and the 2002 Kidz Field has embraced the wonders of modern science and come up with some fantastic innovations screaming out to be enjoyed. There are Maxi and mini gyroscopes, rocket launchers, metal monsters, human train tracks, light shows and shining, neon magicians. Even the Blue Peter style workshops have leapt into the twenty-first century offering a particularly hi-tech form of artistry for today's little hands; paintings are bigger and better and brighter than ever and The Making Place -a travelling workshop designed to turn scientific ideas into real shapes, displayed swinging mobiles of finely balanced flying pink fish, which, on closer inspection turned out to be tightly rolled copies of the financial times. Good stuff.

And of course, it is so pretty in the Kidz Field; more bunting than the Jubilee, less litter than your fussiest Aunt's fussiest best room, proper grass obviously grown for picnicing upon and more bright primary colours than a Postman Pat video. I asked 6 year olds Will and Sophie Rayner from Minehead, what they like best in the Kidz Field. After a long discussion and much deliberating, Sophie chose the super-fast Aerial Runway and Will decided it was a tie between the drinks in the Wobbly Café and the flying trapeze, and the Panic circus where he learned to balance plates, and dinosaur drawing and painting a mural and learning to play the bongos and the whistle and the maracas and the castanets and. . . . . . . . . .

Words by Sandy Francis
Photographs by Alf Goodrich

Updated: 3rd July 2002 12:21