Glastonbury CowShed Studio

June 2011

We designed and built the ‘Cowshed Studio’ at Glastonbury Festival 2011. Based in the Greenpeace field, it was straw-bale insulated and mud-clad. It played host to some of the weekend’s top musicians, who got to enjoy the superb acoustics offered by the straw-bale.

The studio was built for Greenpeace in conjunction with London’s Cowshed Studio. Radiohead were supposed to come and record in it but they got stuck in the mud!

We arrived onsite 14 days before the festival kicked off, to start work on what was to be a massive project… Thankfully the weather served us well and our team of 10 people made quick progress with the help of two forwarders. The next stage saw the 16 x 6m structure being roofed. Gradually all the other marquees and stages took shape around us too.

With the roof boards on and the floor joists in, work began on the cladding. We used straw bales for heat and sound insulation (excellent dead acoustic treatment for inside the studio) and rendered them with clay from in front of the Pyramid stage… not pretty, but prestigious and effective.

Furnished with top-of-the-range recording equipment and producers, the finished article is a professional standard recording studio.