With the August bank holiday on the horizon, this can mean only one thing for the people of Reading: Reading Festival. So, it seemed the perfect time to go through some of our newly accessioned material, and some material that may be accessioned in the future, all to do with the Festival. 

There are a variety of ways records and other ephemera make their way to our collections. One is through donations and gifts, where people and organisations reach out and hand ownership over to us. Another is through our document purchase fund, where we look for items up for sale that may be relevant to our collections, or to Berkshire’s history more broadly. Another way records make their way to us is through our ‘sister’ organisation sitting within Reading Council, the Records Management Unit. Records Management is similar to but different in significant ways to archiving, so a lot of records managers will have a good relationship with a local or institutional archive, and vice versa.  

In our case, the RBC RMU (lots of acronyms) care for ‘modern’ records, or records that are often still in use by their owners, but need to be properly stored, maintained, and ensure that the records lifecycle is completed. For a lot of records, that lifecycle ends with destruction, and these are usually files like finances, which have a 7-year lifespan, or other such records, which are important for audits and other work, but are not meant to be kept forever. Many of these lifecycles are dictated by law. However, the ‘end’ of some other documents life cycle is archive! Our colleagues at the RMU will go through listing information of records before destruction, and if anything stands out as potentially historically valuable, or has already been earmarked for archive, they send it over to us.  

Some records we found recently that might be ideal for transfer to archive are some records relating to Reading Festival. Many of these are licensing reports, with various statistics about festivals past. For example, one report states that in 2006 the festival had an attendance of approximately 70,000+ people per day, which has risen over the years to be approximately 110,000 in recent years [source: Reading Museum]. There are also several photographs of the site from the same year, attendees, and importantly the clean-up job after the festival had ended. There are photographs of posters stating “Free Beer??!! It’s easy – Bring a full bag of rubbish to a Litter Exchange Point...and collect a free beer voucher-1 per bag!!!”. They clearly had some of the same issues we would recognise today regarding litter being left on the site. We wonder if this incentive should be brought back, because further photographs show rather long queues for rubbish depositing!  

We even found a VHS tape (and CD, sadly corrupted), showing a shortlist of short films that might have been shown at the festival. A few of these films on this tape, “Rug”, “10,000 Pictures of You” and “Life Goes On”, were actually shown at the 2006 festival [source: Wayback Machine], so it is wonderful to get the chance to save and preserve these parts of Reading’s cultural history.  

Reading Museum, in another way we get records, have also recently deposited some prints of photographs of Reading festival, showing it from its beginnings in the 1971, all the way until present day. We are even lucky enough to have some rare colour photographic prints from the 1971 festival, showing the camping tents and stages. This is an excellent view into the past, showing the variety of attendees and giving an idea as to what the festival site looked like. To this author’s eyes, it looks very familiar to the Fest we know today! Once catalogued, these will be available for researchers to view in person, although we can’t guarantee when they will be fully catalogued!