UKH

It's passed on! This festival is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet it's maker! It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It's pushing up the daisies! It's metabolic processes are now history! It's off the twig! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off it's mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-FESTIVAL!!

Copied verbatim from an email wot I received:

We have some news, which we know will come as a disappointment to many of you. After very careful consideration, we have decided not to run the full festival in 2023. There are several reasons that have led us to make this call, but underpinning all of them is the desire to have a vibrant and sustainable Keswick Mountain Festival in the long term. By taking a break next year, we aim to safeguard the future of our much loved festival - for us, for our local and national partners, and for all of our wonderful visitors.

The current economic conditions, spiralling costs for staging the event, and the significant squeeze on household disposable income, all mean that Keswick Mountain Festival would most likely incur an unsustainable loss if we pressed ahead with trying to organise it for 2023, putting the whole existence of the festival in jeopardy. It’s a really tough decision to make, but we believe that it is more prudent to have a fallow year and then come back bigger and stronger in 2024.

Please believe us when we state that we have looked at many scenarios to try and run the festival as usual in 2023, but sadly, we drew the conclusion that pushing on and crossing our fingers for the best is too great a risk for everyone involved. Simply passing on our increasing costs to festival goers and exhibitors is not the way that we want to go, and unlike some other events, we don’t get financial support from local authorities, which is disappointing.

In these circumstances, we would rather take this hard decision now, than take a chance and find ourselves in an untenable position in the lead up to the festival weekend. Not only would that put the whole future of the event at risk, it would also cause greater financial pain to our suppliers and exhibitors, and to the local business community, all of whom are important and much valued festival partners.

We know that our brilliant festival goers will be disappointed and we will really miss welcoming you to Keswick in 2023, but we also hope that you will understand why we have taken this decision. And of course, we will be delighted to see you again in 2024, when we plan to return in full and glorious effect. Although the festival will sit out 2023, there is some good news for the runners amongst you. We will be working with Mountain Run to put on a 'KMF Trail Running Weekend' which will take place on the festival weekend of 20 - 21 May. More details on this will be announced in October.

Team KMF. 

Bloody Tories. This would never happen under a Labour government.

Did the festival folk not consider buying some tambourines and extending the festival to 3 weeks.it works for the happy clappers.

It's not dead it's resting (OK maybe stunned) ....

What's odd is the biggest cost of living hit will almost certainly be this year.  The majority of festival goers are comfortably off middle class types in any case.

I'd change the name of the town to Keswick Mountain Festival, nationalise the event, and have it run 6 days a week (closed on Wednesday). 

If it was a proper mountain festival, it would be like orienteering. You'd get a list of what's on, a time and a compass bearing. Films about hard mountain ascents, would be brought to life if you had to sit in the wind and rain, up a hill, to watch them. That would weed out the non dedicated folk, who just want to wander about drinking beer and buying gear.

The company is called Triathlon Edinburgh - I wonder if their core activities have not been so good recently or whether they are just knackered. Doesn't look good though.