We are sad to say that there will be no High Town Festival this year because of the constraints of the current global pandemic. In a typical year, we’d be well into festival preparations for this year by now and would have already had several meetings to create an action plan and start booking entertainment, stalls, health and safety arrangements, road closure etc. However, it was quite clear in the early part of this year that we were unlikely to even know whether events like the Festival would be able to go ahead, giving us too little time to make adequate preparations for it to happen. Given the Festival’s reliance upon the council’s insurance and approval, we felt that it would be unwise to proceed.

On top of this, there have been some key changes to the festival team which will have an even more significant long-term impact on the festival. This leaves the current festival team in a position where it cannot commit to carrying out a future High Town Festival without someone – a group or organisation or individual – who could take this on as a project as well as looking for future funding, and committing to making the event happen.

This has drawn the team to conclude that for now the High Town Festival will come to an end for the foreseeable future. We feel that the 8 years that the festival ran for (including 1 online last year!) were a great success and will hopefully be an encouragement to the community to continue to grow the spirit of High Town and similar such events.

This is obviously sad news, and as a team we felt both a sense of real gratitude for what the High Town Festival has meant for this community as well as a sense of sadness and loss. In order to celebrate the 8 brilliant years of its existence, we will be creating some content to celebrate the journey the Festival has taken over its time.

on behalf of the High Town Festival Team

April 2021