How many people attended the Isle of Wight Festival 1970?

This Jimi Hendrix statue can be found at Dimbola in Freshwater Bay

We all know that the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 was the biggest ever.

It also had a remarkable lineup including Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell. You can see an exhibition about it at Dimbola in Freshwater Bay - and a statue of Jimi Hendrix.

But how many people were at the 1970 festival?

• Encyclopaedia Britannica say 50,000 tickets were sold but say with some confidence that 'some 600,000 turned up'.
• A report by British Pathe says 400,000. 
• The Getty Images caption for this photo claims there to be 120,000 people, but this could be confusion with the Isle of Wight Festival 1969, which was in a different location. ​
• This BBC Archive video claims there are 15,000 watching from Afton Down, with more arriving. It also claims that about 100,000 people bought tickets (double the number suggested by Encyclopaedia Brittanica).
• Another BBC Archive video estimates there are 400,000 attending. 
• Several reports (including the Guardian) say that 'The Guinness Book of Records estimated the total attendance at between 600,000 and 700,000'. But when you actually look at the Guinness Book of Records, it says that organisers put the number at 400,000. A Portsmouth News report quotes the Guinness Book of Records but says the number was actually 800,000 (i.e. double what the Guinness Book of Records actually says).

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The number I've heard most often is the 600,000 figure, but there's a risk that everyone is quoting each other and that the original source got it wrong.

Of course, there's no definitive number because lots of people watched it without paying - but which number is most likely to be accurate?

Some estimates say that the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 attracted 12 times as many people as 2025 (pictured)

Creating a map of the Isle of WIght 1970 site

I wanted to come up with own estimate with the data available, so I started by mapping the 1970 site on Google Maps. I used a diagram of the site that I found in an Evening Standard newspaper article from 1970 and a selection of aerial photographs from Getty Images.

Here’s my rough map:

• ​The section in orange is the ‘spectator arena’, which I calculate to be 10.7 hectares. We’ll call it 11 hectares, as this is just a back-of-the-envelope estimate, rather than something that will form part of a dissertation.
• The purple and pinkish areas are camping fields. I haven't figured out where these ended, but it's not terribly relevant.
• The blue area is parking.
• The big green area is parts of Afton Down where people watched from a distance. It became known as Desolation Hill or Devastation Hill.
• The yellow section is the entrance area as well as things like an ambulance station.

The majority of people watching were in the orange area, according to aerial photographs.

The next thing we need to figure out is how dense the crowd was. The aerial photos show the arena with a vast crowd, but you can see some thinner areas at the edges. We don't know what time this image was taken though, so it might have got busier.

​So, how big a crowd typically fits into 11 hectares?  

​This BBC news article about a Lady Gaga concert demonstrates what five people in a square metre looks like. This makes for a pretty cosy crowd and is similar to my experiences of being towards the front of a modern-day festival.

With that density across the whole arena, you could theoretically fit in 517,000 people. If everyone was stood up and it was a real crush, then the numbers could be even higher. That would take us close to the 600,000 quoted earlier.

However, the crowd at the Isle of Wight Festival 1970 doesn’t look anywhere near as uncomfortable and condensed as that to me.

In fact, most of the photos and videos from the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970 show people sitting down whilst the acts are performing. You can see this during Joni Mitchell's set at about 1 minute 30 seconds ​and in this Free performance.

I’ve heard John Giddings talk about this quirk before. Back then, people tended to sit down at festivals during the music (at this point, I will point out that we’ve gone full circle and half of the people at modern day Isle of Wight festivals turn up with a camping chair).

People do appear to be standing up on this video, but it looks to me as if they stood up for a quick boogie and then sat back down.

What's the capacity in the arena if everyone is sat down?

Let's assume that the arena is 100% full and that everyone is sitting down.

Most information I've found online suggests that in a dense crowd, each person would use up about 0.5 m2 if they sat down. In other words, two people use up a space that is 100cm x 100cm between them. More comfortable spacing would be more like 0.6 m2.

It might be cosier at the front, but we also need to allow for people towards the back who are lounging around a bit and stretching their legs out. Take a look at this image, which appears to be inside the arena. People aren't crammed in with their knees up around their chins.

The photo in this Guardian article gives a good image of how the crowd were packed towards the front. 

So, we don't know exactly how densely packed the crowd was, but I'd welcome memories on this of anyone who was there.

If we take the figure of 0.5 - 06 m2 per person, then that works out as 183,000 to 220,000 people across an 11-hectare site. 

Of course, we don’t know for sure that people weren’t in the campsites during the performances, but it seems a fair guess that most of them were watching the artists.

And what about people watching from outside the arena?

The layout of the 1970 site is such that you get a great view from Afton Down and it's certainly true that lots of people watched from there.

It's tricky to estimate numbers, but here's the information we've got.

• The area that became known as Devastation Hill or Desolation Hill is roughly 14 hectares. This photograph shows the size of the downs. Most people are towards the bottom, and some are towards the flatter section at the top. Some parts of the hill are clearly too steep to sit on comfortably or are full of hedges, so it's patchy.​
• The photo in this Guardian article is the most crowded shot I've found of the hill. Some patches are empty whilst others around the top are packed with tents.​
• We can get another good view from this photograph, which gives us an idea of crowd density on the downs. Again, we don't know what time these photos were taken but we can see that the arena is busy. We get another view from this photo, further away from the stage and see that the crowd is petering out.
• The BBC archive video that we mentioned earlier interviews one of the organisers (Peter Harrigan), who says "most of the people have sat on the downs and watched the music there, very few have come through the gate as a proportion".
  

If we take a density of one person for every two square metres (that’s just a guess, this is a hard one to estimate) then that would add another 70,000 people to the number of spectators. The BBC report mentioned earlier said 15,000, with people still arriving, so my best guess is that it would be between these two figures.

​As I said, this is hard to calculate.

​My conclusion and best guess

My conclusion is that there were somewhere around 200,000 – 300,000 people watching the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970, from inside the arena and on the hillside.

This higher figure is based on:

• the 11-hectare arena being completely full, but with everyone sat down in quite tightly packed spaces
• an area of the downs covering about 14 hectares being occupied at a rate of one person per two square metres

I can't see where figures of 600,000 - 800,000 have come from, based on the information I've found.

It’s possible that I’ve completely missed something here.

Did the crowd overflow into camping areas during performances? Did a huge number turn up on Afton Down later? Did the number perhaps come from counting the crowds from Friday, Saturday and Sunday and then adding them together? Is there some data that we've excluded, such as ferry tickets?

If you were there and want to add your thoughts, please leave us a (polite) comment.