Glastonbury Festival is known for its music, art, and alternative wellness culture. Over the years it’s grown into the UK’s biggest festival, spread over 900 acres and 80 stages, it attracts around 200,000 festival goers for five days every summer.
Incredibly 2025 will be the Travelling Homoeopaths Collective’s 35th year at Glastonbury and again 20 homeopaths stand ready to take more healing energy to the festival and support festival-goers in need.
Why Homeopathy at Glastonbury?
Festival environments can be exhilarating but also physically and mentally demanding. Long days, unpredictable weather, and large crowds can lead to exhaustion, stress, minor injuries, and with 200,000 people relying on portaloos, a myriad of digestive upsets. As we know, Homeopathy offers a gentle, natural approach to supporting well-being, helping people enjoy the festival to the fullest.
A team of trained homeopaths will be available yet again this year to assist festival-goers with common complaints such as:
- Fatigue and dehydration
- Anxiety and overstimulation
- Muscle aches and strains
- Digestive discomfort
- Minor cuts and bruises
By offering these services, we can enhance the festival experience, ensuring attendees feel their best throughout the event and, as importantly, promote homeopathy to a demographic that’s not always easy to meet.
Brief history of Travelling Homoeopaths Collective
The Travelling Homoeopaths Collective (THC) was created in the summer of 1990 by Marcus Christo, determined to provide a mobile homeopathic clinic and the opportunity to promote homeopathy at festivals, fayres and other outdoor events.
Our practitioners work on a voluntary basis. THC is a Registered Charity and nonprofit making organisation. All donations to the charity go towards maintenance, travel expenses, and the further promotion of Homeopathy.
How You Can Help
To ensure THC can continue its vision, we urgently need your support. Your donations will go toward:
- Restoring a cherished part of our homeopathy community: our beloved Bodicca … the festival bus
- Educational materials to promote homeopathy. Our role at Glastonbury is also to broaden the general understanding of homeopathy, and to show people that there are alternatives to mainstream medicine.
- Production of the THC Directory – which we use to sign post all those who visit the mobile clinic to a homeopath in their area
Get Involved
- Donate – Visit our crowdfunding page https://www.gofundme.com/f/our-homeopathy-battle-bus-boddica-needs-your-help and contribute whatever you can.
- Share – Spread the word on social media and with friends who support alternative wellness.
Our target is £5,000 to get Bodicca battle ready for this year, but ultimately our goal is £15,000 make her last for another 60 years.
Every little helps! Thank you!
Why is Bodicca, our iconic Red and Blue Festival Bus, so crucial?
Bodicca has been integral to Travelling Homoeopaths Collective’s (THC) festival presence since 1992. It attracts many festival goers to the homoeopathy clinic, giving us the opportunity to not only talk about the bus but also explain something about homoeopathy.
Bodicca is now 60 years old and the passage of time has taken its toll. Wear and tear have left her in desperate need of restoration and repair. Sadly, the wooden frame is now rotting, she is no longer rain proof and we have noticed significant mould which has taken its toll on our own health whilst driving her around. Without immediate attention, we risk losing this invaluable asset.
That’s why we are turning to you for help. We urgently need to gather the necessary funds to restore Bodicca to her former glory. Every contribution, no matter how small, will make a significant difference in our efforts to preserve this vital piece of not just THC history, but also its future.
Bodicca’s main job is to carry all the equipment necessary to set up at an event and once set up, solar panels on the roof charge up a large bank of batteries in the boot. This allows us to light up the marquee and enables us to operate longer hours as we can actually see the print in our repertoires!
Out on the open road people honk their horns, flash their lights and wave to us. With our logo and contact details on the back panels and side door she promotes promotes homoeopathy everywhere she goes. She is an iconic figure on the festival circuit. A photogenic crowd puller providing the background to many a photo shoot!
Last year she underwent a large restoration to part of her wooden frame and the interior, but alas there is still more needed to make good here as well as a desperate need for a repaint. At the last count there was less than 20 of these buses still on the road.
A trip down memory lane –
Carol Boyce recalls the early days of THC at Glastonbury Festival…..
My volunteering adventure with THC at Glastonbury back in 1990 was my own first festival experience. It began with a long trudge in heavy rain through fields of mud, with my 9 year old daughter and all our camping gear. Her look said it all. We were drenched but committed, so we pressed on and eventually pitched our tent.
That first THC homeopathy clinic marquee was divided into two and shared with a group of allopathic nurses. By lunchtime of the second day, even as the rain fell, the queue for our services snaked out of the tent. Late that afternoon the nurses crossed the divide to ask what we were doing – they were “bored” because they had no “customers”. Word had quickly spread among the Glastogoers that the Homeopathy Tent was where it was at. A handful of non-judgemental homeopaths were solving the issues that inevitably arise from 70,000 festival goers living together in tents for 3 days!
The rain rarely stopped but the show had to go on. We dealt with everything from exhaustion to severe vomiting and diarrhoea, from emotional meltdowns to bad trips and everything in between. We made our mark, saved the festival experience for many and set the scene for the following 34 years. More importantly it gave us the opportunity to introduce untold numbers of people to homeopathy, from our satisfied ‘customers’, to the hoards of passers-by, and to demonstrate to the intrigued nurses that there is a cheap, safe and effective alternative to pharmaceuticals.
What my 9 year old made of it is still hard to say.
For all you petrol heads –more about this iconic vehicle from Marcus Christo, THC Founder
Bodicca is a Bedford J2 SZ with a 220-diesel engine and weighs around 3.5 ton. Her coach conversion was carried out in Scarborough by Plaxtons and the conversion is known as an Embassy.
She went on the road in February 1964 and originally had 20 seats – she was owned by a coach company in Leamington Spa called West End Garages. She did many mini-European breaks.
At the end of her service, she was acquired by a school in North Norfolk called Marshland High School before being purchased by a lady in Sloley and was originally one of the Peace Convoy Buses before coming to rest on a track to a railway cottage in Sloley and then being acquired by Marcus Christo in 1991.
She was missing her gearbox and exhaust. Her braking master cylinder was an issue which took a while to resolve.
Over the years she has been repainted three times. The first two by an amazing vehicle painter called Jools, who now paints the bins at the Glastonbury Festival.
She has also suffered engine failure on the way back from The Larmer Tree Festival to our then home in Salisbury, which resulted in an engine rebuild.
For so many reasons, she’s well worth saving.