For nearly two decades, Shangri-La has represented the bold, subversive heart of Glastonbury Festival—a sanctuary for radical creativity, artistic expression, and countercultural thought. But for the 2025 edition, this iconic section of Worthy Farm is entering a transformative new era. Abandoning familiar frameworks, the area will re-emerge under a pioneering new vision titled The Wilding—a metaphor for reclamation, rebirth, and the untamed power of collective imagination.
Under the visionary leadership of creative director Kaye Dunnings, Shangri-La is leaving behind its past, not just symbolically but literally. The team is stripping everything down to its roots, redefining its purpose, atmosphere, and even its physical makeup to create an entirely new experience that reflects both introspection and wild optimism.
A Departure from Satire to Solution
For years, Shangri-La has been Glastonbury Festival’s beating heart of cultural commentary and rebellious creativity. From dystopian set designs to immersive installations that mock societal norms, its messages have often been laced with irony and critique. One of the most memorable of these was the Everything Must Go theme, which powerfully dissected consumerism, waste culture, and the capitalist obsession with profit. With installations echoing the chaos of big-box retail environments and tongue-in-cheek slogans, it became a living, breathing critique of material excess.
However, 2025 brings an intentional shift. Shangri-La is no longer satisfied with simply highlighting the problems—it now seeks to foster genuine dialogue, inspire change, and nurture optimism. The new theme, The Wilding, is not only a fresh aesthetic; it is a radical shift in tone and purpose. Creative director Kaye Dunnings made it clear that the previous cycle was not metaphorical. When we said ‘Everything Must Go,’ we meant it. And now, everything is gone. This sentiment reflects a conscious departure from demolition to cultivation.
The Wilding represents an ecosystem of possibility. It suggests that once old structures have been dismantled, fertile ground remains—ready to be planted with new ideas, intentions, and connections. The cultural undercurrents behind this theme are not incidental. The world is currently experiencing a renaissance of thought around topics like regenerative living, climate restoration, emotional well-being, and the revaluation of human connection. These global trends echo within Shangri-La’s redesigned identity, giving the festival not only relevance but visionary resonance.
Visitors in 2025 can expect to enter a space that doesn’t just entertain or provoke—but invites. It invites introspection, interaction, and imagination. The Wilding moves beyond sarcasm, instead cultivating sincere engagement. Rather than mocking the world’s ills, it opens a door to hopeful possibility, asking festival-goers to become active co-creators of a more connected and compassionate cultural experience.
Tangible Storytelling: A Tactile Approach to Communication
In a world increasingly dominated by scrolling thumbs, pixelated content, and algorithm-driven attention spans, Shangri-La’s team has made a brave decision to minimize their presence on social media. This strategic withdrawal is not a rejection of modernity, but a powerful statement about the kind of connection they want to foster. Instead of ephemeral clicks and ad-driven metrics, they are returning to physical media, personal touches, and intentional storytelling.
The 2025 reveal of The Wilding was not delivered via hashtags or influencer campaigns. Instead, Shangri-La sent out 100 intricately designed physical packages—each handcrafted with care and rich in symbolism. Inside were limited-edition risograph posters and a packet of sunflower seeds. These objects, modest as they may seem, are dense with metaphor. The risograph prints, vibrant and imperfect, mirror the beauty of analogue processes. The sunflower seeds symbolize hope, regeneration, and the patience of growth. Together, they express the new ethos Shangri-La is committed to—one that embraces slowness, intimacy, and natural evolution.
Artist Rosie Lee Wilson brought the visuals to life, crafting organic patterns and illustrations that evoke wildness and wonder. The printing was handled by 16 Tonne Press using eco-conscious risograph methods—an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional mass production. The paper itself was supplied by Bristol’s Arboreta Papers, known for their commitment to sustainability. Each sheet is 160gsm, recycled, acid-free, and produced using ethical materials, ensuring that even the medium itself tells a story.
This gesture is about more than aesthetics. It is a deliberate pushback against the homogenization of digital media. It’s about communicating with care, choosing quality over quantity, and rekindling the thrill of receiving something tactile in an increasingly virtual world. And it’s also a reclamation of storytelling—returning it to the hands of real people, not platforms.
To continue this philosophy beyond the packages, Shangri-La has introduced a new mailing list under the name Sign up for joy!—a direct, ad-free line of communication that curates announcements with thought and care. This isn’t just marketing; it’s a redefinition of how a community can stay connected, share progress, and remain inspired without the noise of modern media.
Rewilding the Experience: Culture as Living Ecosystem
Shangri-La’s 2025 concept does not stop at a new message or rebranded visuals—it extends deeply into the experience architecture of the space. The Wilding isn’t simply about returning to nature; it’s about reclaiming space as something participatory, unpredictable, and alive. In past years, the layout of Shangri-La was often frenetic, focused around high-volume venues that commanded attention. While visually powerful, this format often led attendees to rush from one headline act to the next, unintentionally bypassing the nuanced storytelling embedded in smaller installations and interstitial zones.
That will change in 2025. This year, Shangri-La is being redesigned as a space that rewards the curious. Its new layout prioritizes serendipity and layered discovery. Visitors will be encouraged to slow down, explore, and immerse themselves in the stories, art, and moments scattered throughout the grounds. The spatial strategy deliberately disrupts linear paths, using meandering walkways, unmarked entrances, and obscured sightlines to rekindle the thrill of getting lost.
This design concept draws from ecological principles—just as rewilding restores biodiversity by removing man-made constraints, Shangri-La is removing the festival equivalent of fences, queues, and bottlenecks. Instead, it’s creating an open-ended narrative environment. One where guests can form their own journey, make unexpected connections, and experience something new every time they walk through it.
By returning to this organic model of festival navigation, Shangri-La reconnects with its earliest roots. Back when smartphones didn’t dictate where to go next, and discovery was driven by instinct and wanderlust. In today’s hyper-mapped, hyper-planned world, the simple act of stumbling upon a hidden performance or a secluded installation has become rare. The Wilding brings that spontaneity—and the magic that comes with it—back to the forefront.
Planting New Rhythms: Culture, Collaboration, and Community
The emotional and artistic nucleus of Shangri-La has always been its community. The dancers, builders, painters, thinkers, and audiences who transform temporary scaffolding into sacred space each summer. In 2025, that human connection becomes more vital than ever. The Wilding isn’t just about what the space looks like or how it sounds—it’s about how it feels to be there, together.
While final performance lineups are still unfolding, it’s already clear that Shangri-La’s new stages—such as Lore, Luna, and Azaadi—will continue to push boundaries, both sonically and socially. The idea is not just to book acts, but to co-curate experiences. Whether it's Brighter Days Family bringing inclusive dance-floor energy, or South Asian collectives like Lila Music and Going South reshaping the cultural dialogue around representation and space, every corner of the field will have something to say—and a way for you to participate.
In that spirit, The Wilding becomes more than a festival theme. It’s a call to action: to nurture spaces that feel alive, to collaborate without ego, to engage with the unfamiliar, and to let art evolve in the open air. Shangri-La 2025 may be the most immersive, community-driven, and emotionally resonant iteration yet. A place not to escape from reality, but to reimagine it.
Shifting from Digital Dependence to Human Connection
As digital saturation continues to dominate nearly every corner of modern life, Shangri-La at Glastonbury Festival is making a bold cultural pivot. For 2025, the beloved countercultural zone is scaling back its digital presence—not out of nostalgia, but as a conscious act of resistance. This departure from the norm is more than symbolic; it’s a deliberate step toward rekindling genuine human interaction in an era when such connections are often filtered through apps, likes, and algorithms.
At the heart of this shift is the introduction of a new communications initiative called Sign up for joy!—a curated email list designed to replace social media blasts with calm, considered storytelling. Rather than relying on the endless scroll of social platforms, this approach allows Shangri-La’s creative team to speak directly to their community, unmediated by corporate advertising or data-driven targeting. In a climate where social media often amplifies division, anxiety, and performative content, this return to slower, analogue-inspired communication feels deeply resonant.
Kaye Dunnings, the creative director behind Shangri-La, articulates the philosophy behind this change with clarity and intent. We’ve become disillusioned with social platforms. What once felt like a communal, creative space has turned into something overly monetized and divisive. We want to bring joy back into how we communicate—one handmade package, one heartfelt email at a time.
This is not a retreat from relevance but a redefinition of it. Shangri-La's pivot toward mindful connection underscores a yearning for authenticity in a noisy, cluttered digital world. In place of FOMO-inducing content or promotional videos optimized for engagement metrics, Shangri-La is prioritizing intimacy, emotional resonance, and trust. This gentle withdrawal from mainstream digital marketing is not a loss—it’s a cultural gain, one that places human relationships and genuine artistic integrity back at the center of the festival experience.
Reviving Real-World Experience in an Over-Connected Age
Shangri-La’s reorientation also mirrors a growing cultural fatigue with the omnipresence of screens and the relentless demand for attention. By disengaging from social media, the team is not only revising its promotional strategies but also inviting festival-goers to consider how digital dependency impacts real-world experiences. In many ways, this decision is a reflection of The Wilding’s broader ethos: reconnect with the earth, with creativity, and with each other—unfiltered and uninterrupted.
The reliance on social media in recent years has made even the most immersive events vulnerable to surface-level consumption. Instead of getting lost in music or art, many find themselves reaching for their phones to capture, post, and validate the moment. Shangri-La’s approach actively disrupts that pattern. It encourages participants to fully inhabit the space, to look up and look around, to engage with installations and performances not through a lens, but with all senses attuned.
Sign up for joy! isn't just an alternative communication tool—it’s an invitation to slow down, to engage more consciously, and to rediscover the magic of anticipation. There’s something beautifully nostalgic about receiving a thoughtful email or a physical package, a kind of intimacy that algorithms can’t replicate. Shangri-La is banking on this emotional texture to cultivate a more loyal and invested community, one that values presence over promotion.
In doing so, the team is also building a long-term strategy rooted in sustainability—not just environmental, but social and creative sustainability. The festival becomes more than a spectacle; it becomes a sanctuary for genuine human engagement. This rare commitment to depth over reach is already resonating with fans and artists alike, many of whom are weary of the transactional nature of mainstream media spaces.
A Vision Beyond 2025: Introducing a Multi-Year Evolution
While 2025 marks the formal debut of The Wilding, the team behind Shangri-La is clear that this is not a one-off transformation. Instead, it’s the starting point of a visionary, multi-year journey—one designed to evolve gradually, thoughtfully, and in harmony with the changing rhythms of culture and the land.
As part of this long-term plan, Glastonbury Festival will observe a scheduled fallow year in 2026, allowing Worthy Farm’s soil and ecosystem to rest and regenerate. But for the Shangri-La collective, this pause is more than just environmental stewardship. It’s a creative intermission—a rare opportunity to refine, research, and expand upon the themes introduced in 2025.
We’re treating 2025 like a pilot episode, says Dunnings. It’s our opportunity to test new ideas, build new spaces, and discover how this new direction resonates with the community. We’re not just refreshing the area; we’re reinventing it entirely.
By framing the current iteration as a prototype, the team frees itself from the pressure of immediate perfection and instead emphasizes exploration and adaptability. This methodology reflects many principles found in nature: organic growth, experimentation, and resilience. The Wilding is not fixed—it’s fluid, designed to respond to feedback, surprise its creators, and evolve in tandem with those who participate in it.
The break in 2026 will serve as fertile ground for even more radical developments. It gives the community time to digest what Shangri-La offers in 2025, and it gives artists, collaborators, and visionaries the opportunity to co-create the next chapter with intention. When Shangri-La returns in 2027, it won’t just be bigger—it will be deeper, more rooted, and even more aligned with its guiding principles of regenerative culture and conscious celebration.
Reimagining Cultural Infrastructure Through the Lens of The Wilding
The Wilding is not merely a name—it’s a manifesto in motion. At its core, the concept asks: what happens when we stop trying to control culture and instead allow it to grow, adapt, and self-organize like a wild ecosystem? This approach breaks from traditional festival design, which often centers on rigid scheduling, over-sanitized spaces, and pre-approved narratives. In contrast, Shangri-La seeks to reintroduce spontaneity, plurality, and rawness to the festival experience.
This strategy permeates every level of production. From the dismantling of legacy structures to the introduction of new, experimental zones and paths, every decision in 2025 reflects a broader ambition to challenge expectations. The space is being rebuilt not only physically, but spiritually—as an open field for exploration and a platform for shared authorship. Attendees are no longer passive spectators; they become part of an ecosystem where every action—whether dancing, listening, creating, or simply observing—contributes to the overall experience.
Crucially, this doesn’t mean chaos. Like nature itself, The Wilding operates within patterns—it is not disorder, but complexity. The team has carefully curated how different elements interact: art installations that speak to soundscapes, workshops that bleed into performances, resting areas that inspire reflection. It’s a living infrastructure, one that acknowledges the messiness of authentic human expression while offering just enough structure to foster cohesion.
This ethos also extends to the artists, curators, and contributors who make Shangri-La what it is. The festival is moving away from top-down programming toward a collaborative approach that prioritizes diversity, decolonized storytelling, and experimental formats. Whether it’s a South Asian DJ collective reimagining sonic rituals, or an art installation built by local craftspeople, every contribution is seen as integral to the whole.
The Wilding, then, is not just a theme—it’s a transformation of intent. It redefines what a festival area can be: not a space of escape, but a space of emergence. A culture grown, not engineered.
Architecture of Adventure: Redesigning the Journey
One of the most quietly revolutionary elements of Shangri-La’s 2025 transformation is the rethinking of how people experience space—not just what they see or hear, but how they move, how they stumble upon moments, and how they create personal narratives within the festival landscape. The physical layout of Shangri-La is undergoing an imaginative overhaul. This isn’t merely a cosmetic redecoration or a reshuffling of stages—it is a fundamental reimagining of spatial storytelling.
In previous years, the main venues often commanded immediate attention, drawing crowds toward intense, high-octane performances. While unforgettable in their own right, this dynamic sometimes led to a bypassing of Shangri-La’s quieter, more intricate elements: the miniature installations tucked into alleyways, the hand-painted murals behind unassuming doors, or the poetic texts hidden in shadowed corners.
For 2025, the creative team has chosen to invert that model. Rather than forcing attendees into funnelled routes or predetermined flows, they’ve designed a layout that actively encourages drifting. Think of it as an anti-map—a landscape intended to disorient, enchant, and reward curiosity. Labyrinthine paths curve away from the expected. There are forks in the road with no signage. Light and sound are used subtly to hint at possibilities, not to dictate directions.
Kaye Dunnings describes it as returning to the early essence of Shangri-La, a time before GPS, before coordinates were exchanged via apps. Back then, you had to trust your senses. That act of surrendering to the unknown is something we’re bringing back. It’s about reviving the thrill of serendipity, the joy of dislocation.
This restructured geography also serves a thematic purpose. The Wilding, as both a theme and a method, draws from the natural world’s unpredictability. Just as rewilded landscapes resist straight lines and fixed outcomes, this new layout invites fluidity. It asks guests not to plan their route, but to co-create it. The experience becomes immersive not by designating what to do, but by allowing it to unfold without control.
Spatial Ecology: Designing with the Senses in Mind
The spatial reconstruction of Shangri-La goes beyond the conceptual. It is being built with an emphasis on sensory stimulation and experiential layering. Every corner of the field is envisioned not just as a place to look at, but as a place to feel through. This design philosophy weaves texture, sound, scent, and temperature into the visitor’s experience.
Materials have been chosen not just for their aesthetic appeal but for how they age, how they echo underfoot, or how they catch natural light. Reclaimed wood creaks beneath steps. Weathered fabrics ripple in the breeze. Recycled metals oxidize into color-shifting patinas. Rather than hiding imperfection, the builders are inviting it in—leaning into entropy as a creative force.
Ambient audio will drift from unexpected places—under benches, through gaps in walls, from above eye level—designed to disorient just enough to keep you grounded in the moment. It’s a reminder that discovery isn’t only about sight but about immersion in a multidimensional environment. You don’t find meaning at Shangri-La—you encounter it.
Another innovation is the introduction of threshold spaces. These transitional zones—small courtyards, dark passageways, plant-lined groves—create punctuation in the visitor’s journey. They offer pause, perspective, and a chance to recalibrate before plunging into the next sonic or visual spectacle. These spaces are both aesthetic and functional, serving as moments of emotional decompression within the vibrant chaos of the broader field.
This shift in design is also a gentle critique of conventional festival infrastructure, where sensory overload is often the default. Shangri-La 2025 challenges that template, presenting a more sustainable rhythm of experience. Not everything needs to be maximalist. Sometimes the quietest spaces say the most.
A New Sonic Landscape: Debuting a Reimagined Line-Up
As the physical space transforms, so too does Shangri-La’s sonic identity. The musical programming for 2025 is undergoing its most profound refresh in nearly two decades. Of the legacy venues, only Nomad will return in familiar form. All other sound stages are brand new, each one architected to hold a distinct auditory identity and cultural narrative.
The Shangri-La Main Stage will be a beacon of genre collision and creative unpredictability. Headliners like Pa Salieu, Ca7riel and Paco Amoroso, and Irish rap provocateurs Kneecap will deliver sets that traverse cultural boundaries and genre expectations. The curatorial philosophy here is clear: no homogeneity, no linearity—just high-impact musical storytelling.
Lore emerges as a sanctuary for boundary-breaking, globally rooted experimentation. Artists like Frente Cumbiero bring new iterations of cumbia infused with dub and electronic pulses, while MC Yallah and Debmaster offer gritty, future-forward hip-hop that subverts linguistic and sonic norms. Even punk legend Steve Ignorant will join, creating a space where past and future radicals collide.
Luna will dominate the festival’s late hours. This stage will be curated by influential nightlife collectives including Brighter Days Family, Skepta’s Mas Tiempo, and MAJ!C—the supergroup of Maya Jane Coles, Chloé Robinson, Jammer, and Alex Jones. More than just a dance venue, Luna is designed as a sensory haven: light, scent, and architecture converge with sound to form a holistic clubbing ritual.
Azaadi, inspired by last year’s breakthrough Arrivals stage, will focus on South Asian diasporic music. With programming by Going South and Lila Music, this space will host everything from classical ragas with contemporary reinterpretations to bass-heavy electronic sets rooted in Mumbai or Lahore’s underground. The design of Azaadi reflects a commitment to cultural amplification, with a larger footprint and inclusive access to ensure that diasporic representation is not peripheral—but centered.
Reimagining Stage Identity Through Cultural Intersectionality
Each of the new stages at Shangri-La is not merely a platform for performances—it is an architectural and cultural statement. The decision to rename and redesign each space comes with the goal of eliminating legacy branding and encouraging fresh associations. These are not recycled ideas in new wrapping—they are living, breathing installations in their own right.
The stages are conceived as micro-worlds. At Lore, sonic experimentation is physically embodied through layered textiles, abstract sculptural forms, and non-linear lighting grids. At Luna, architecture responds to bass—sound triggers visual effects in real time. Azaadi, by contrast, offers calm intimacy, shaped with earth tones, woven textures, and warm lighting to reflect the hospitality and intensity of South Asian cultural spaces.
Shangri-La is pushing beyond simply programming diverse lineups—it is embedding cultural hybridity into its bones. That includes involving international architects, local craftspeople, and sound engineers who specialize in site-specific builds. Every inch of the venue, from how the sound moves to how the crowd flows, has been reconsidered.
In doing so, Shangri-La avoids the pitfalls of tokenism or box-checking. Instead of inviting difference into a fixed space, the spaces themselves have been designed in dialogue with the artists and communities they aim to elevate. This intersectional approach is a continuation of The Wilding’s central ethos: to allow systems—musical, spatial, social—to evolve organically rather than imposing pre-fabricated norms.
What emerges is not a festival area in the traditional sense, but a network of coexisting worlds, each vibrating at its own frequency but rooted in a shared soil of inclusivity, experimentation, and creative freedom. It’s a new blueprint for what immersive music spaces can become—dynamic, co-authored, and deeply human.
Music Meets Meaning: Creating Shared Rituals
Music has always been the emotional heartbeat of Shangri-La, but in 2025, its role deepens beyond performance into something more ritualistic, communal, and transformative. This year’s programming is intentionally designed to go beyond passive entertainment. At its core is an invitation—for every festival-goer to participate, connect, and co-create.
Rather than building lineups around headliners and streaming metrics, Shangri-La’s 2025 curation focuses on experience architecture. The idea is not just to listen to sound but to become part of it. To move from audience to actor, from bystander to belonging. Across the field, visitors will find stages that pulse with live energy, but also art installations that sing, immersive zones that breathe, and performances that emerge from the crowd itself—often unannounced, unpredictable, and unforgettable.
Among the cornerstone moments, Fatboy Slim’s 100th Glastonbury appearance stands tall—a rare milestone in any artist’s career and a testament to his enduring connection with the festival’s spirit. But even this headline is woven into a broader narrative: legacy acts standing alongside fresh faces, emerging talent sharing the stage with originators. DJ Randall’s multigenerational jungle set will feature Goldie and GQ alongside his son Rio Tashan, forming a familial constellation that embodies both tradition and future-forward innovation.
Elsewhere, Joy (Anonymous) will host Joyous People—a takeover devoted entirely to community celebration and radical inclusivity. The space won’t just be about dancing; it will be a ritual of presence, a sanctuary of shared breath and unfiltered emotion. You don’t attend these sets so much as you dissolve into them. It’s this level of emotional granularity that separates Shangri-La from typical festival zones. Music here is not a commodity—it’s a shared language, an atmosphere, a memory being written in real time.
Each set, each sound, each silence has been curated with intention. Not every moment is loud. Some are hushed, reverent, designed to offer pause or provoke reflection. This intentional pacing allows for greater resonance—every beat landing with emotional weight, every lyric offered like a gesture of invitation. Music becomes a means of collective meaning-making, echoing the deeper themes of The Wilding.
Immersive Interactions: Beyond Performance
The boundary between performer and participant is all but erased in Shangri-La’s new configuration. Rather than rigid stage setups and isolated acts, the area thrives on the fluidity of roles and the breaking of fourth walls. Installations invite touch, spaces encourage dialogue, and performances bleed into walkways, forming living murals of movement and story.
Interactive installations take many forms. Some may be sculptural, offering tactile exploration. Others may be participatory rituals involving sound, movement, or communal creation. You may stumble upon a small group writing poems together in silence or encounter a massive sound sculpture that requires bodies to operate it. These aren’t attractions—they are moments of intimacy dressed as art.
Theatricality remains a foundational aspect of Shangri-La’s identity, but it now functions less like a stage show and more like a folk festival where performance is layered into the everyday. Street theatre evolves into political provocation, comedy emerges from corners, and spoken-word epiphanies burst forth in places where you least expect them.
There is also a renewed emphasis on workshops and knowledge exchange—spaces where dance meets dialogue, and art intersects with activism. These sessions range from instrument-making to collective healing circles. In every format, they affirm that creativity is not only an output but a process. A ritual. A gathering point. The Wilding invites all to contribute—not by being the loudest voice, but by showing up with openness, curiosity, and respect.
And because Shangri-La sits at the festival’s edge—both physically and ideologically—it has the freedom to take risks. To question norms. To ask, what if a dancefloor could also be a protest? What if a rave could also be a ceremony?
Rekindling Community in a Changing World
At its heart, Shangri-La is a tapestry of people: creators, builders, sound engineers, choreographers, poets, set designers, volunteers, and the many unnamed hands who make the impossible appear overnight. But more than that, it is a village—a transient, evolving village fueled by radical care and mutual respect.
In past years, Shangri-La’s sprawl began to resemble a bustling metropolis: layered, chaotic, loud. While that energy electrified the night, it also diluted the close-knit feel that once defined it. For 2025, the organizers have chosen to scale back—not in ambition, but in density. What’s returning is a sense of scale that allows for recognition, familiarity, and intimacy. You may find yourself meeting the same stranger twice in one night. You may remember the name of the bartender, or the artist who helped you paint your sign.
We’re going back to something smaller, more intimate, says Kaye Dunnings. More like a village. And in doing so, we hope to uncover the raw, irreducible essence of what Shangri-La has always been.
The humor will remain—always irreverent, always tongue-in-cheek. So will the DIY ingenuity and punk-rooted commitment to action. But there is also growth here, in the willingness to ask harder questions and listen longer to the answers. It’s not just about fun, though that still matters. It’s about building sustainable joy. Joy that holds space for grief, for struggle, for recovery. Joy that doesn’t come at the expense of others.
This evolution speaks to the broader shifts in festival culture. The pandemic years disrupted the model; now, events that survive must offer more than diversion. They must offer meaning. Shangri-La 2025 steps into that role with open arms.
Living Legacy: Creating the Future by Honoring the Past
What sets Shangri-La apart is not just its aesthetic or its lineup—it’s the fact that it listens to its own history. Every brushstroke on a wall, every light fixture, every beat in the soil carries the memory of past festivals. But 2025 isn’t about nostalgia. It’s about allowing those memories to breathe into new forms.
Joyous People is not a branding exercise—it’s a reclaiming of the collective joy that marked Shangri-La’s beginnings. Fatboy Slim’s return isn’t just a headline—it’s a generational bridge. And every spontaneous jam session or collaborative mural is a seed, part of a future that’s still being dreamed.
Shangri-La doesn’t exist outside time—it moves with it. And in this current chapter, with the world longing for reconnection, for authenticity, for transformation that doesn’t sacrifice play, this village on the edge of Glastonbury becomes something more than a field. It becomes a cultural hearth. A place where the old meets the new not with fear, but with a grin and an open hand.
This living legacy is built not by preserving what was, but by trusting what could be. And in 2025, that trust is in full bloom. Whether you’re a first-time visitor or someone who’s danced in these fields for a decade, this year promises something not just entertaining—but elemental.
The Wilding: A Manifesto for the Future
As Shangri-La embarks on this new journey, The Wilding stands not just as a theme, but as a cultural provocation. It asks: What happens when we stop clinging to the past and let wild ideas grow? What can bloom when we step away from screens and return to real-world connections? And how can art and community build new futures in a world hungry for hope?
Shangri-La 2025 doesn’t just promise another chapter—it promises a renaissance. With wild roots, creative freedom, and a deep respect for collective joy, this bold reinvention might just be the most inspiring experience on the fields of Worthy Farm.
Final Thoughts
As Glastonbury Festival continues to evolve with the changing world around it, few areas embody that spirit of fearless reinvention more powerfully than Shangri-La. With its 2025 transformation into The Wilding, this legendary corner of the festival isn't simply debuting a new theme—it’s beginning a new era. One rooted in environmental awareness, artistic freedom, and emotional authenticity.
Shangri-La has always served as a cultural mirror, reflecting the anxieties, critiques, and dreams of the times. What makes 2025’s vision so profound is its shift away from just holding a mirror to society’s flaws and instead turning that mirror inward. It challenges both creators and festival-goers to ask: how can we be part of the solution, not just the satire?
This year's approach places real emphasis on reconnection—with nature, with each other, and with creativity untethered from algorithms or corporate trends. By ditching digital announcements in favor of hand-printed mailouts and newsletters, Shangri-La is choosing slower, more meaningful forms of communication. In a world that values speed and scale, this is a revolutionary act of resistance—and one that could spark a wider movement across festival culture.
From its redesigned layout that encourages exploration to its genre-defying music stages and expanded cultural representation, The Wilding invites us to rediscover the thrill of the unknown. It’s not just about spectacle or escapism; it’s about crafting a collective environment where imagination and action meet.
This deeply considered reinvention makes one thing clear: Shangri-La is not content to coast on past glories. It seeks to break new ground—both literally and metaphorically. With its eyes set firmly on the future, 2025 promises not just a memorable festival experience but the beginning of a long-term legacy, one that prioritizes joy, inclusivity, artistry, and connection above all else.
In a time marked by noise, burnout, and division, Shangri-La’s message is simple yet powerful: return to the wild. Reconnect with the real. And together, let’s grow something truly extraordinary.
