All British life is at Glastonbury - except Nigel Farage...

The pastoral quilt of glamping tents and a VIP backstage area reflect the UK’s increasing disparities. Can the idealistic city hold out against the hypercommercial music industry, asks

- Luke Turner

The aerial photograph of Glastonbury is part of the festival’s identity. Here lies an English pastoral quilt of field boundaries, roads, farm buildings and an old railway line, but scattered with the colourful dots of tents and stages, as if a kaleidoscope has been broken and shaken over it.

In recent years, this chaotic assemblage has changed, the original festival site now surrounded by neat rows of glamping tents and yurts that can cost thousands of pounds each. In their precision and tidiness, these photographs bear an uncanny resemblance to old images of army encampments, somewhere far away in the 19th-century British Empire.

This is the elite side of Glastonbury. On Thursday afternoon, the Flightradar24 aircraft tracking website showed helicopters buzzing to and from the festival site. One charter firm had been offering flights from London to the festival site for £13,950 return, with the 20-minute hop from Bath at £7,250.

In May, some well-heeled festivalgoers were left out of pocket when glamping company Yurtel, which had been selling £10,000-a-head luxury packages including hot tubs, cocktail bars and a chauffeur service, went into administration. One off-site pop-up hotel charges £38,000 for its top packages (any luxury camping offerings are run by external companies).