‘People were running for their lives’: This Croydon festival got shut down by a swarm of bees

Dionne Simpson was enjoying her evening at Croydon festival Matt’s BBQ before some unwelcome visitors disrupted the festivities. Partygoers at Purley Way Playing Fields were watching a packed line-up of local acts when they had their night rudely disrupted by a huge swarm of bees.

Simpson reportedly saw the swarm head in her direction at around 9pm on Saturday July 2. ‘As the swarm intensified people began to run towards the exit point screaming and trying to swat these things away,’ she says. 

Although Londoners are no strangers to events being shut down, it's not normally bees that are the culprit. But as Simpson told Time Out, ‘There was no way the event could have continued. The swarm was too much. They were flying into people's faces, getting caught in their hair and generally being a nuisance. It literally felt like an attack. People were honestly running for their lives.’ 

It all sounds a lot like 1978 Irwin Allen horror film ‘The Swarm’, and Simpson confirmed the bee infestation looked very much like the cloud of insects that attacked the film's star Michael Caine.

Cleverly, Simpson took cover in a nearby coach situated in the car park. But the bugs seemed to be attracted to the colour of the paint on the bus, says Simpson. ‘A good number of them just continued to ram themselves into the coach. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.’

In footage on Twitter and Tiktok, partygoers can be heard screaming and seen ducking out of the bees' flight path. One Twitter user wrote: ‘The whole thing felt like a horror film’.

How many bees would it take to shut down Glastonbury? Well, it's significantly bigger than Matt's BBQ, so our guess is about 150,000. That's more than 20 swarms. Ouch.