Greenpeace host their own field at Glastonbury Festival and it was an honour to be invited to take the role of Design Coordinator for the project. The brief was to communicate Greenpeace’s campaign to turn the arctic into a global sanctuary in order to stop destructive drilling for oil. The design I worked up included an oil rig climbing wall, a row of farmers market huts inspired by the polar architecture of Svalbard, and an explorer’s base camp for talks and discussions. The focal point of the field was home to the arctic circle, a scale model made using NASA data of sea ice melt between 1979 and 2012, showing the alarming rate of decrease of the extent of the ice.

The team being new, we were keen to incorporate fresh ideas into the design, including increasing the number of reusable structures, increasing the amount of local, natural materials used to build the structures, and incorporating a raised ‘boardwalk’ allowing mud free wheelchair access to all the features in the field.

We commissioned Snow Business who work on film sets to provide biodegradable falling snow and recycled paper snow coverings for the roofs of the buildings to give a realistic arctic feel. to the whole field.