Access All AreasArts and music event Strawberry Fair, which regularly attracts more than 30,000 visitors on the first Saturday of June each year, will not take place in 2025.
Organisers of the free-to-attend festival, which was established in 1974 and is run solely by volunteers, said it was not feasible to stage the event due to costs having doubled in the past decade.
The event’s chair of programming Mark McGivern said, “Ten years ago, the fair cost £100,000, now it’s going to cost at least £200,000.”
Strawberry Fair’s organising committee released a statemen in which it explained that it intends to spend this year reassessing the Fair’s business model and fundraising, so that the event can return in 2026. An online fundraiser has been launched here.
Committee chair Liz Nathan said, “The costs of running the Fair have doubled over the past ten years, and over half of that increase has happened since 2021. Every year the volunteers on the committee work hard to raise the money required, but last year was the most difficult I have known in over a decade of helping to run the event.
“We cannot keep continually increasing the fees that we charge our traders and bars for attending the Fair, because they are also facing increasing costs and there is a limit to how much they can afford to pay.”
The Fair has largely funded itself through pitch fees paid by bars and traders, supplemented by fundraising throughout the year and by individual donations from the public.
In recent years, Cambridge City Council has also included Strawberry Fair among the recipients of community and cultural grants, which organisers said has significantly helped the Fair to keep going despite rising costs.