As Latitude prepares to mark its 20th anniversary this summer, one figure has been there from the very beginning. Not on a stage, but in a marquee, handing out tea and coffee to exhausted parents while their toddlers splash happily in little baths.
Keith Meldrum, who runs The Loft youth group in Southwold, East Anglia, has operated the festival’s baby and toddler tent since Latitude’s inaugural year. What started as a modest favour for a new festival uncertain about its family offering has, over two decades, grown into one of the event’s most distinctive and warmly regarded features. For many regular festivalgoers, it is as much a part of the Latitude experience as the music itself.
It started out really, really small. They put tickets on sale, they had a line up, and then they started to attract a family audience. People were asking them about their family provision, and they decided they needed to firm it up a bit.
The organisers reached out to local youth groups, and Meldrum’s team stepped in with a clear idea of what they could offer. Their vision was simple but thoughtful: a small marquee, an enclosed outdoor play area, free tea and coffee for parents, cold drinks for children, baby changing facilities, and a quiet space for nursing mothers. They also introduced the straw bales that have since become a visual hallmark of the wider kids’ area at Latitude.
“We were the origin of the straw bales,” Meldrum says with a smile. “If you go to the kids’ area of Latitude, you’ll see straw bales everywhere, but we were the origin of them.” Two decades on, the setup is considerably more ambitious, with dedicated play equipment and a well-drilled team of young volunteers, but the founding spirit remains unchanged. “It’s pretty recognisable what we do now compared to what we did then,” he says.
One innovation, introduced in later years, has become particularly cherished by the families who use the tent. Baby bath time gives parents the chance to bathe their infants in portable tubs, filled with a careful mix of boiling water from the urns and cold water from the site supply, tested by the parent before the baby goes in, with or without bubble bath as preferred.
It is logistically demanding, requiring two urns running at full capacity while teenagers run back and forth keeping everything topped up, but Meldrum describes it with undisguised delight. “It is just amazing to see a row of four baby tubs with these smiling, laughing little babies sat in them, splashing around. By the Sunday, the gratitude that the parents have, knowing that at least once every day they are able to get their baby properly clean, is just fantastic.”
He is the first to acknowledge what a feat of organisation it requires. “We have to have two urns, because we’re also doing tea and coffee at the same time as we’re doing the baby bath. The teenagers are just running backwards and forwards to our water supply, bringing more and more water to keep the urns filled and to keep topping the baths up.” Yet not one volunteer, he says, has ever suggested they drop it. “I don’t think there’s anyone who’s ever had any involvement in it who would say, ‘I don’t think we should do that.’ It’s just a brilliant thing.”
The operation is run almost entirely by teenagers from The Loft, and Meldrum is as proud of what the experience does for them as he is of the service it provides to families. For many of the young volunteers, some of whom start helping out at twelve years old, it is the first time they have done something genuinely useful for people outside their own family. “Going up to someone and just saying, ‘Would you like a tea or coffee?’ is a big thing if you’re 13 and you’ve never done it. When they say yes, and they’re really grateful, that gives these teenagers a sense of value and social interaction they probably won’t have experienced before. You can just see their self-esteem building from it.”
The tent itself, a 12-metre by six-metre marquee, offers a reliable refuge when the Suffolk weather does what Suffolk weather inevitably does. “When the heavens open, because it’s England, we are packed. Everyone is filling every square inch of shelter from the rain.” But far from being a problem, Meldrum sees those crowded, rainy sessions as some of the most rewarding. “It just creates a great sense of community within the people who use it. There are people who come back year after year, and within a festival you build a bit of a relationship with them.”
That sense of community has, remarkably, now spanned generations. Last year, a young mother visiting the tent mentioned she was fairly certain she had been there herself as a small child, back in the early years of the festival. Meldrum’s own daughter, Bella, holds what he suspects is an unofficial record: she attended her first Latitude at the age of one and has not missed a single year since. His son, too, grew up treating the festival as a natural part of life, doing his annual Diablo routine in the sunshine while his father sat nearby with a pint. “They never got into live music,” Meldrum says, “because live music has been a part of their life since before they can remember.”
Away from the festival, The Loft runs weekly sessions on Tuesday evenings from 5:30pm for children in years four to seven, held in a large loft space at the Stella Pesket Millennium Hall in Southwold. The venue offers snooker, pool, table football, table tennis, board games and a PlayStation with Just Dance, alongside a tuck shop. Its real value, though, lies in something less tangible. Children from the area tend to share a primary school but then scatter across several different secondary schools, and The Loft becomes the place where those friendships are maintained and new ones are made. “You can’t tell which group is from which school, because everyone’s just mixed together. Their friend is the one who’s playing the same game or doing the same craft. It forms friendships that endure into adulthood.”
After twenty years, Meldrum still makes sure to carve out time to enjoy the festival for himself. He has his own collection of cherished Latitude moments, including the time he wandered into a tent with a sandwich and a drink and found himself watching a young, somewhat dishevelled Paolo Nutini rambling affectionately about street names between songs that would soon become well-loved classics. “That’s one of the things I like about Latitude,” he says. “You can just stumble across something that then subsequently becomes huge.”
This year he is particularly looking forward to Get Down Services on the Sunrise Arena and, above all, Self Esteem, whose set a couple of years ago left him wanting more from the moment it ended. “She is amazing. If you were dithering between two things to do when she’s on, that is definitely the one to go to.”
But ask him for his single most treasured Latitude memory and he reaches not for a headline act or a surprise discovery, but for a wet afternoon under a tree, three ponchos dripping with rain, his children beaming from ear to ear as a band played on. “Memories like that you can’t really plan to have,” he says quietly. “Latitude is somewhere where memories like that happen a lot.”
The Loft runs Tuesday evening sessions from 5:30pm at the Stella Pesket Millennium Hall, Southwold. The Loft Baby and Toddler Tent is in the family area at Latitude, held annually at Henham Park, near Southwold, Suffolk.
Article based on extracts taken from a radio interview by broadcaster Neil Whiteside. Watch the full interview at the link below.
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