Shangri-La: Glastonbury 2025

Shangri-La has long stood as Glastonbury’s unruly conscience — part protest zone, part party bunker — but in 2025, it took a radical, thoughtful turn. The Wilding was not just a new theme, but a structural and conceptual overhaul: a blend of rewilding politics, environmental urgency, queer joy, and community ritual, staged across one of the most visually ambitious site builds Glasto has ever seen.

 At the centre of this year's iteration was The Shangri-La Stage, encircled by the towering PoliNations trees, originally created by Trigger for the Birmingham 2022 Festival. they were reimagined here as towering, ghostly monuments to land, love, and loss.

Three times a night, these trees came alive in The Wilding AV Show — a mapped, multisensory performance combining projection by Universal Pixels, visuals by FRAY Studio, and a powerful score by Echoic Audio. The show explored human connection to land and ecology with genuine emotional weight, elevated by vocals from Rider Shafique, Ngaio, and Gardna, and a haunting, poetic delivery from queer performance collective Shade Cartel. It was one of the most compelling pieces of site-specific storytelling in recent Shangri-La memory — conceptually coherent, technically seamless, and tonally perfect.

Musically, the stage pulled no punches. Fatboy Slim's 100th Glastonbury set drew the kind of crowd you'd expect, but it was the bookings further down the bill that made it feel vital — from Pa Salieu to Ca7riel & Paco Amoroso to Example, BCUC, and Marc Rebillet. The programming leaned global and progressive, and was given the space it needed to breathe.

Shangri-La didn’t stop there. The expansion into four distinct music venues — Lore, Luna, Azaadi, and the returning Nomad — gave the field fresh depth and texture. Lore felt like a DIY shrine to underground roots, hosting everything from Frente Cumbiero to MC Yallah & Debmaster, while Luna dialled up the intensity with euphoric takeovers from Mas Tiempo and Joy Anonymous. Azaadi, curated by Lila and Going South, was a long-overdue and genuinely moving celebration of South Asian culture, headlined by a historic return to the decks from Bally Sagoo.

Nomad, Shangri-La’s heartspace for protest and queer resistance, retained its identity. With takeovers from Brownton Abbey, Pxssy Palace, and Popola, plus a landmark showcase of Māori and Pacific artists curated by Lady Shaka, it proved once again that you can still throw a rave and say something worth saying.

Beyond music, The Wilding took curation to a new level. The Allotments — a garden of 12 artist-activist plots — stood as a microcosm of the broader Shangri-La ethos: creative autonomy, radical collectivism, and deep ecological reflection. From Coral Manton’s crop circle-inspired Fieldworks, to the Palestine Solidarity Garden, to the moving Slave Song allotment by Rider Shafique, the installations walked the line between sincere and subversive with confidence. Even surrealist pieces like Tat Vision’s Teleshrubbies or the deeply strange Bed of Nettles by Andy Doig felt rooted in something bigger.

Outdoor art brought texture to the field, most notably with Threads of Resistance, a collaboration between Shangri-La and Amnesty International. A giant willow tree installation by Women That Fabricate became a focal point of the weekend — hundreds of ribbons bearing messages of hope and resistance tied to its branches. The activation felt authentic, amplified by spoken word and surprise sets from the likes of Kate Nash and the Nova Twins.

If there’s any critique to level, it’s that the sheer scale of the offering occasionally pulled focus from the intimacy and chaos that once defined the area. Shangri-La used to feel like a secret you stumbled into — in 2025, it felt more like an open-air biennale. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but some might miss the smoke-filled alleyways and anarchic club venues of its pre-2020s heyday.

Shangri-La Creative Director Kaye Dunnings said:

“I want people to walk away with the belief that the future is in their hands. When we come together as communities, we have the power to create real change. Trying to take on the world’s problems alone can feel impossible — but by working collectively, especially at a local level, we can start ripple effects that lead to something much bigger.”

Still, what The Wilding achieved — conceptually, politically, and atmospherically — was no small feat. It proved that radical aesthetics, meaningful programming, and jaw-dropping AV can coexist without compromising each other. It was not just a part of Glastonbury — it set a new standard for what festival culture can look like when imagination is met with execution.

At the heart of Shangri-La was The Grow Room – a sun-powered greenhouse bar and print studio buzzing with workshops from legends of the DIY scene like Black Lodge Press, Page Masters, and Giant Triplets. Here, risographs, collages and letterpress prints weren’t just art—they were tools for hope, rebellion, and change. Nearby, Threads of Resistance, featuring surprise sets from Nova Twins and Caitlin O’Ryan, brought performance and protest together in a powerful collaboration with Amnesty UK. Meanwhile, Sonic Bloom—a secret collaboration between Edible Bus Stop, Sounds Right and curator Kaye Dunnings—invited festivalgoers to tune in to the frequencies of nature, proving once again that silence and stillness can be just as radical as sound.

Beyond the main stages, the Allotments offered a playful, poignant reimagining of communal space. With installations like Teleshrubbies by Tat Vision and The Anarchist Gardeners Club by Black Lodge Press, these plots bloomed with absurdity, reflection, and resistance. Slave Song by Rider Shafique transformed history into visceral poetry, while Grow Up by India Rafiqi wove graffiti into living foliage. A new crop of artists, supported by a-n, showed festival-first commissions—art born of rebellion and joy. Threading all this together was The Wilding AV Show, a nightly visual and sonic spectacle projected onto 40ft sculptural trees, scored with the voices of Rider Shafique, Gardna, Ngaio and more, and brought to life by queer collective Shade Cartel. In every corner of the field—from kinetic sculptures to renegade Morris dancers, folklore raves to immersive storytelling—the collectives of Shangri-La turned Glastonbury’s southeast corner into a living, breathing call to action.