By Monday morning the music had stopped. Kendal Calling had run for four days at Lowther Deer Park, some forty thousand people had come and gone,1 and the camping fields held what nobody had wanted to carry home: tents still pegged out, chairs folded and left where they stood, sleeping bags lying open in the grass.
Fifteen people walked in to see what could be saved: nine volunteer staff from Westmorland and Furness Council and six from Restore.2 Access came through BetterNotStop, the festival's anti-waste agency. The Well Communities and Manna House were working the same fields.
Some fields had almost nothing left. Others, in the words of Rich Scoffham, the council's Eden Local Focus Hub Manager, were "sadly quite the opposite". By the end of the day the Restore van was full. "We did however turn this negative in to a positive," Scoffham wrote afterwards.2 Everything in it is now with our shop in New Squares, Penrith, set aside for people in need.
This is not a complaint about the festival
It would be easy, and wrong, to tell this story as a criticism of Kendal Calling. The festival is one of the best in the country at exactly this problem. Its campaign, Leave Nothing But Memories, has a blunt goal: no tent left behind. In 2024, the most recent published figure, 98.93 per cent of tents went home with their owners.3 Co-founder Andy Smith asked for "100% of tents taken home next year".4 This year's figure is not out yet.
The festival's own online game counts 284 tents left behind in a single year, each taking up to 10,000 years to break down.5
So, 284 out of tens of thousands. A very good number by any standard.
A festival can lead the country on this and still leave enough behind to fill a charity's van.
What usually happens to an abandoned tent
Most people believe a tent left standing at a festival gets collected and given to someone who needs it. A generous instinct, and mostly mistaken.
Matt Wedge of Festival Waste Reclamation & Distribution put it plainly in 2018: "There is a common misconception that leaving your tent is like making a donation. It's simply not the case." By his reckoning, even after the charities have carried away all they can, up to ninety per cent still goes to waste.6 The Association of Independent Festivals estimates around 250,000 tents are abandoned at UK festivals every year, most heading for landfill.7
The harder questions
When the council posted its photographs, most of the response was warm. Not all of it.
"This is brilliant but dosent solve the actual problem, but instead can fuel it," one person wrote underneath. "People will leave stuff behind now with the mentality that not only will somebody clear up after them, but also benifit from them leaving their stuff."2
It is a fair worry. The more serious objection comes from inside the homelessness sector. Leeds City Council refused to let salvagers at Leeds Festival hand tents directly to people sleeping rough: it wanted people supported into accommodation, it said, and a tent can leave someone more exposed to being targeted or exploited. Simon on the Streets, a Leeds charity, was firmer still. "We never give out tents," it said. "A tent is sadly not safe accommodation and also brings many challenges."8
They are not wrong, and nobody here thinks a tent is a home.
But a Homeless Link write-up set down the other half of it. Those risks are present for anyone sleeping rough, whatever they are sleeping under. A tent makes a person easier for an outreach team to find, not harder. It gives somebody a place to put their things and a door they can close, and was often handed over because no accommodation was available at all.9
What the van is actually for
Restore is a charity shop, four of them: one in Penrith and three across Carlisle. Our charitable registration says we exist to relieve poverty and hardship by providing household items to people in need, which is the long way of saying that when somebody comes in short of something, we try to have the something.10
The official estimate of people sleeping rough across the whole of Westmorland and Furness last autumn was fourteen.11 Fourteen, in the most sparsely populated local authority in England, on a single night, arrived at by estimate, not by walking the streets. The council's own homelessness strategy is careful about that figure. "It should be noted that geographically rough sleeping is primarily an issue in towns," it says, "however this may be due to challenges around reporting and identifying individuals in rural areas."12
Behind the fourteen sit larger numbers. In the last three months of 2025, 223 households were owed a homelessness duty by the council. Sixty-six were in temporary accommodation at the end of the year, and thirty-two of the people in them were children.13
None of that is fixed by a vanload of camping gear, and it would be dishonest to suggest otherwise. We are not an outreach service. The Well Communities and Manna House were in those fields alongside us, and they do the work of getting people housed and keeping them well.
What a shop can do is have the thing there on the day somebody asks. Sleeping bags, roll mats, camping chairs and tents that three days ago were on their way into the ground are now at the Penrith shop, held back for the people who need them. None of it is an answer to anyone's housing. It is a sleeping bag, and it belongs with someone who has nothing to sleep in, not in a landfill cell.
Lorraine Cooper, the Penrith shop manager, was out there with the trolleys, and afterwards put her finger on the part that matters:
"Everyone worked so hard in the hot weather. It was a great day. But most importantly Restore Penrith can now confidently continue with our work of helping support the homeless in our local area. We have successfully stopped all this going into landfill. Repair rewear restore."
Continue. Not start.
