‘I’ve never smelt anything like it’: confessions of a Reading Festival litter-picker

We’ve all heard the horror stories about the campsites at Reading & Leeds Festivals. When I first went in 2007, there was plenty of talk about riots on Sunday night. But the reality of that was just a group of spotty teens, walking around chanting “angry mob” and occasionally throwing a half-empty can of Lynx Africa onto a fire. Some would burn their tents to save them the effort of carrying them home, but that stopped in 2010, with campfires being banned on the last night of the festival.

Still, as the tens of thousands of revellers returned to reality this week, the Reading and Leeds sites were again left looking like warzones.

Twenty-year-old Aoife Mcmorrow spent her Monday walking through the campsites, making sure the abandoned tents were as empty as they seemed before bulldozers began clearing the area. (At Woodstock in 1969, a tractor drove over a sleeping 17-year-old festivalgoer and killed him.) People were supposed to have left by noon, but as late as 3pm, some were found in their tents, sleeping off their big night out.

A volunteer, Mcmorrow worked three eight-hour shifts over the course of the weekend in exchange for a ticket to the festival. “It was the most disgusting week of my life,” she tells me over the phone, before apologising for her croaky voice. Like a majority of the people who attended, she’s come down with Festival Flu (a variant on Freshers’ Flu) and is doing regular tests to make sure it isn’t Covid-19.

Working 9-5 on Monday, Mcmorrow experienced some harrowing things. “Some of the tents were so big, I had to go inside them to check no one was in there and the smell was unbearable. I’ve never smelt anything like it, and I never want to smell it again.”

Working around “used condoms, air mattresses with some interesting stains, and loads of sick,” Mcmorrow and the other volunteers found wallets, phones and the shoe from a YouTuber who’d tried to break into the festival – all of which were handed in to lost property. “I’m trying to block the whole experience out.”

They also found unopened food and unused camping equipment that could have been recycled, but Mcmorrow wasn’t allowed to get involved. She was told it wasn’t her job, and someone else would handle it. Walking back to the staff campsite at the end of her shift, she filmed a quick video of the mess that remained in some of the quieter campsites and uploaded it to TikTok.

The clip has already been viewed over four million times; in the comments, thousands of people have expressed their horror. Similar viral clips show people finding designer clothes left behind, while horror stories about soiled underwear and dirty protests on strangers’ tents flood social media.

“I wasn’t surprised by how much was left behind,” says Mcmorrow (who had been to Reading before), “but it was disappointing. I think people have the impression that it’s just someone else’s job to clean up after them, which isn’t a mindset I respect.” Late last week, a local recruitment company were still advertising Festival Litter Picker roles, paying £10 per hour.

“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not Woman of the Year when it comes to being environmentally friendly and I’m guilty of leaving my tent behind at the first Reading I went to – but I wasn’t aware it was such an issue. There’s so much talk about sustainability and being environmentally friendly now.

“People need to be encouraged to think about these things. Something needs to be done because morals just don’t do it any more.”

Grace Gomez also spent Bank Holiday Monday on site at Reading. The founder of local charity New Beginnings Reading, her and a small team of 10 were looking to salvage as much food and drink as they could in order to replenish the food bank that they’d started to run over lockdown.

They’ve done similar things for the past four festivals. In 2019 they recovered over 300 tents and this year, while another charity went to recover camping equipment for them, the New Beginnings Reading team salvaged a few thousand pounds’ worth of food in just two hours. It’ll now be held in quarantine for a minimum of 72 hours before being distributed.

After “a strict application process that involves a health and safety video and agreeing to various rules and regulations,” charities are allowed onsite at noon on Monday for four hours. They’ve also got Tuesday and Wednesday to recover what they can before whatever is left is sent to landfill – though, with those being working days, fewer people are able to help.

Searching through “all the usual filth you’d expect to find is not a pleasant job,” says Gomez. She avoids talking about the specific horrors, probably because it’s easier to return to the festival year-on-year if you don’t dwell on what you’re actually searching through.

Sophie Drew, who was also involved in the clean-up operation, told The Mirror: “In the hour I spent scouring the grounds, I managed to find 20 pairs of glasses and 10 vapes, as well as a used condom. However, my findings are nothing compared to what others have seen.”

Her fellow pickers found half a pair of false teeth, an inflatable penis, a ball gag, a passport, bags of cocaine, nitrous oxide canisters, soiled tampons and 50 iPhones.

While there is a drop-off point for unwanted camping equipment, Gomez continues, “I’m not sure what percentage of people bother”. As it stands, there’s nothing for unopened food or drinks.

“To be fair, the site was better this year than in 2019. We could actually see patches of grass where people had made an attempt to take their tents away. I just think people need to be encouraged more to think about what they're doing.”

Agreeing with a Reading councillor who told The Telegraph that festivalgoers should pay a clean-up tax, Gomez believes that “if there’s a fine, maybe people would think twice.” She adds: “But the organisers could do a lot more to raise awareness.”