‘A godsend at 5am’: the ultimate, sometimes surprising, festival kit list, by the experts

Festival aficionados share their must-haves for Glastonbury and beyond – from blackout tents to blister plasters – and what to leave at home

• The best camping mattresses and sleeping mats, tested

Packing for a festival is serious business: get it wrong, and it can mean the difference between the best weekend ever to one spent wet and miserable with a bad back (shout out to my friend Amy who forgot her raincoat for last year’s Lost Village, a daytime-focused music festival set in a woodland, and was forced to wear a bin bag).

More so than normal camping, festival packing requires taking the right stuff to be comfortable on your feet all day (and probably night), but packing light enough to be able to lug it all to your site. You can’t change the date of a festival to a weekend with better weather, which could mean heatwaves or thunderstorms. Or both.