These Are All The Wild Cars We Saw At The Glastonbury Festival

This was one of two flying car creations that you could find at this year’s festival, with the other being a winged Jag that adorned the front of The Other Stage. The sculpture is one of a handful of creations from artist Joe Rush, founder of the Mutoid Waste Company, who has built a name for himself designing mammoth creations out of scrap.

This good boy is another creation from the Mutoid Waste crew, which we caught up with in the buildup to the 2022 festival. While touring the collective’s studio, its team explained how it makes treasure from trash.

The flagship car art at this year’s event was Carhenge, which is a replica of prehistoric structure Stonehenge. The creation comprises 24 cars that are balanced precariously atop one another and each pack in designs inspired by a different facet of the festival.

At Carhenge this year, there were vehicles plastered with images of musicians such as Prodigy vocalist Keith Flint and another inspired by designer Vivian Westwood.

If you like your car art a little smaller, though, then Glastonbury had that too. This cute little frog was created from the bodywork of two different Volkswagen Beetles. It’s limbs were also crafted from various scrap car parts.

Shangri-La is one of the late night areas at Glastonbury Festival and its theme this year focused on consumerism and the disparity between the haves and the have-nots. That’s where this Rolls-Royce comes in. Plastered with parking tickets and wheel clamps, the piece highlights how some are untouchable from the rules and regulations that govern most normals.

Of all the cars I spied at the festival, this was the one I’d most like to take a ride in. It’s another piece from Mutoid Waste and packs a slick paint scheme and the kind of off-road modifications you might need at Glastonbury if the rain sets in.

Sure it’s not a car, but it’s awesome so deserves a spot here as well. This is the Dragonfly from art and music collective Arcadia. Fashioned from an ex-military helicopter and a whole heap of scrap, the Dragonfly was a stage that came to life every night with performances from the likes of Fatboy Slim and Eric Prydz. It breathed fire, had lasers for wings and its LED eyes could survey the surrounding dancers.

Another car-adjacent stage was Terminal 1, which was created to highlight the issues with Britain’s immigration policies and processes. Made using the original sign from Heathrow’s Terminal 1, access to the stage was only granted once revelers answered a question from the UK citizenship test.

If you passed that test, you were granted access to a space that highlighted the ridiculousness of the UK government’s policy of shipping migrants off to Rwanda, and another that mimicked an air traffic control room showcasing the movement of people around the world. Rather shockingly, one of the designers of this space couldn’t actually see their creation in action after immigration services denied their visa.

Finally there was Platform 23, a stage built around an abandoned London Underground train. By day, this graffiti-covered train carriage provided a moment of respite, but by night the party kicked off once again.