Croissant Neuf Summer Party is the multi-award winning festival brought to you by the team behind the Croissant Neuf Big Top a solar powered venue that has been at the heart of Glastonbury’s Greenfield’s for 25 years. Since it’s debut in 2007 Croissant Neuf Summer Party has become a haven for families with an emphasis on community, friendliness and all things green, situated on a stunning site near Usk in Monmouthsire. We spoke to Luke about the Festival.

How does it feel to receive a highly commended award from Green parent magazine for a second time? 

It’s always a nice pat on the back when you get the thumbs up. But then we think what we can do to take it to the next level. Being awarded for our achievements for a 2nd time though is great. 

Do you have any new green initiatives for this year, possibly travelling to the festival? 

Not directly we lost out in 2009 to A Green Festival Award, but in 2010 we was overall ‘greenest’ UK festival the top Green award and last year we received an Outstanding award. It was extremely close between ourselves Shambala and Sunrise Festival, we fell down on transport.

I think car sharing is something we are concentrating more on this year. More so than going down the route of providing a mini bus service because we are such a small event and the people that come to our event are from all over the Country. I don’t know whether we would be able to fill up a coach for example from any one particular point because people are coming from all around. 

About 30% are local to the festival and everyone else travels from all over the UK. We have festival goers, from Bristol and Bath, a lot travel via the M4 corridor. We also get a lot of people from London and Swindon. 

Have you contacted the Big Yellow Bus? 

I have a friend of who lives in Brighton who put me in touch with them, they are on my to do list. From my point of view it’s a case of looking at all the options and working out which one we think is the most realistically achievable this year. Anything that costs us money or costs more for the festival goers is something we are not opposed to by any means, it’s just a case of working out if it is going to be more of a long term plan or whether it’s something we can implement this year. 

Tell us about your healing area? 

My Mum is a director and is much more involved in this side; we have had it at the Festival for the past 5 years. It has everything from the various forms of massage, reflexology, Reiki and various workshops. They have a Shamanic workshop and homeopathy Workshop over the weekend with talks and demonstrations to introduce you to the subjects.  

I think this year they are building upon that so it’s not just a place where you receive massage but to show people what they are about and for the skeptical. There are no adverse affects, it’s not all crystal balls and hippies. Perhaps calling it a healing area isn’t the best choice of words, it’s a complimentary therapies kind of area if you just want to go and sit somewhere quiet away from the hubbub of the festival arena and it’s nice and relaxing if you want some peace 

What do you do food and drink wise? 

We’re not all organic and we’d love to be all organic if we could guarantee that it was all from local suppliers. We have a pizza stand and all of their produce is organic, there’s 6 caterers on site, 2 of them are definitely totally organic and the other 4 use organic produce. 

We do have a strict rule that all tea and coffee has to be fair trade and as much produce as possible comes from local sources because local is just as important as organic things. 

To get local and organic is the ultimate goal but if we can’t get organic, if the options are getting organic but it comes from long distance and has lots of air miles or travel miles then we say it’s best to go local. 

Alcohol and beers? 

The alcohol in previous years was expensive and not as nice as we would have liked. We tried some organic wines and local wines but the feedback from the public was not great.

I am now in talks with the Co-op about their fairtrade wine range, we are trying to source the best quality wine that we can get that has an ethical background and  although imported it does tick some of the boxes for us. 

All the ales and ciders are from local suppliers and actually the guy’s that run the bar actually press their own cider and there’s another farmer nearby who presses cider. It depends on what the apples are like that year, all the ales are from local suppliers and it’s all from hand pumps from barrels there’s no carbonated pump or anything like that in the bar. 

Will you be back at Glastonbury next year? 

As far as I am aware we will be back, the Croissant Neuf field will be there once more. Personally I don’t work with Croissant Neuf at Glastonbury anymore, I used to but I now work alongside the Elliots who co-ordinate the green fields.

But yes as far as I can gather it’s all going ahead, preliminary talks are happening and they want us back and want our stage again.

I have been going to Glastonbury every year since I was born and as far as I’m aware mum and dad have been going since I was born and longer. 

Is Green Access and Mobility Areas going to return this year? 

Good question, my dad who is also a director deals with this area (my mother and father own Croissant Neuf) and I got involved working on the festival when I was 19. 

Dad is responsible for this and it’s something that he’s been quite hot on. We offer tickets for people who have disabilities and they get free carers tickets. Because the event is all all solar powered and we’re totally off grid we do what we can to help people that have certain medical requirements. 

So if they’ve got batteries that need charging or medical equipment or wheelchairs, we do our best to help them out and advise them about what we do have on the site or what we may be lacking.

We don’t want to be a non access event, we want to be open for everyone that wants to come. But we have to make sure that we can cover everyone’s needs whilst eactually being able to do it so. 

We try to make it clear to people that if they do have special requirements then please do get in contact and we’ll do our very best to accommodate. If they have special requirements then obviously we need to talk to them in advance. we are an equal opportunities and access event, it’s something dear to me. 

Is it possible to be carbon neutral and is it feesable to be scaled up for a larger events? 

Good question, if you speak to our site manager, he’s adamant you could do it for a much larger event, you could but it would take some serious financial investment. 

The reason ours is low on the carbon emissions is because we have zero generators of every kind, we even use waste vegetable oil. Although it’s much greener than using diesel, you’re still burning a product though it’s much more neutral because the oil isn’t being dug out of the ground. 

I think you could do it, you would have to educate the organizers of larger festivals somewhat because they have such high power demands. They would have to reduce those, moving to led lighting systems as opposed to sodium bulbs or filament bulbs. Not having things like lighting towers left on all day, those kind of things. There would have to be an element of educating them so they reduce their power consumption so that they can then run what they need to run off things like solar power or the various renewable’s. 

We are quite lucky because the event site is held on land which is predominantly used for forestry so we can plant trees directly on the site whereas other events don’t have that capability. But I think it is achievable, I think you could probably do it at a 10,000 person event possibly. 

Sunrise Festival are already well on their way to achieving that with about 10/15000 people and although they’re not 100% solar powered they are trying but are some way off yet being 100% renewable powered. As far as I am aware they are not using any mains hook up or any diesel generators. I know they use vegetable oil, but you kind of have to at an event that size, it’s the lesser of 2 evils, it’s better to do that than use diesel generators. 

I know the organisors and I know they’re making every effort to get more on site, it’s one of those things, there are not anywhere near as many companies or organizations out there offing solar generating options for events. 

There’s  a Greener Festival Alliance that’s just started up this year, it has been set up by Julies Bicycle, Chris from Shambala, Firefly Solar and one or two others. It’s great because it means there is a distinct move within Festival Organizers and the Festival Industry to try and green up events. There was a meeting earlier this year in London, an inaugural Greener Festival Alliance symposium and they decided to focus on power. There were people from all backgrounds and walks of life doing everything from, offering power provision, right through to people from Festival Republic, the biggest festival organization in Europe.

Everyone was there because they wanted to make their events more green so it’s encouraging that and it’s getter more press attention. 

Are you going to be doing anything special for the Olympics? 

We’re launching the sports academy, we have sports every year but we are kind of  formalizing that everyone who takes part in the sports are going to get a certificate. 

So they can get a sense of ownership of an achievement they have done whilst at the festival. So we’re not putting on the sports because of the Olympics but we are going to have sports so that people who are sporty minded can come and get involved. 

I think so much of the media is going to be focused on it people are saying it would be quite nice to have a break from it so we don’t want to go all out and have an Olympic style/themed festivals, that’s not we are going for. 

Of all your awards has any one of them meant more to you? 

Personally speaking the first year we won the overall Greener Festival Award that meant a lot to me more so because of who we were up against. 

We were up against some of the biggest festivals in the country and we were tiny, we still are tiny, 3000 sounds big but it’s not big at all. 

Winning the overall Green Award and winning it twice and being declared the greenest festival in the country over people that had more financial backing than us and more. 

Organisers can employ people to write very green and ethical policies, all the green policies that have been written have been written by myself, so that was a proud moment for me a recognition of what we were doing personally speaking. 

I am much better at getting out there and doing it practically than I am sitting about in an office and writing about it, put me out in a field and I will make it happen more than having to write about it, so yes it was nice to get that 2 years running. 

Is there anything specifically you would like to say? 

Personally it’s been a fantastic opportunity to do something that I’m passionate about. I live in Bristol and worked installing solar panels, before that I worked in green oak timber framing so all the work I have done has been in the sustainability industry. 

Working for my parents when I was younger,  going to the green road shows and doing the kind education side of things. The way I look at it was to combine all those experiences and skills that I’d learnt over the years to do something where we could put on an event. 

It’s  nice to be able to walk around on the Saturday afternoon when you’ve got everybody out, two and a half thousand people in front of you having a nice time and smiling and knowing I’ve been involved in setting it all up. I like the idea of being able to show people that there are ways of doing things that can make a difference. 


Croissant Summer Neuf Party takes place Near Usk, Monmouthshire Fri 10th to Sun 12th August 2012 Tickets on sale HERE