Tom HallThis year’s Port Eliot Festival is set to be the last for the the forseeable future, organisers have revealed.
The festival cited financial pressures for the decision, with organisers finding it harder to put on an inspirational event on budget.
Port Eliot Festival is billed as a free-ranging festival of ideas, assembling artists, musicians, writers, comedians, performers, thinkers, makers, protagonists, agitators and scribblers to ‘one of the most beautiful corners of the country’.
This year’s Port Eliot Festival will run from 25-28 July at St Germans, on south east Cornwall’s Rame Peninsula.
A statement on the website reads:
We are truly sorry to announce that this year’s Port Eliot Festival will be the last for the foreseeable future.
While we may return one day, we would like to take this opportunity to express our overwhelming gratitude and love to everybody – our audience, the unrivalled Festival team, our longstanding Festival partners, EVERYBODY – that has made the Festival an internationally-recognised event.
Port Eliot Festival is unique, it is genuinely independent. Unfortunately, in recent years, it has become increasingly challenging to present a truly inspirational programme while remaining financially viable.
Since 2003, we have had the privilege and honour of working with some of the most creative and interesting people in existence. We have thrived on attracting the most exciting and influential figures in literature, music, poetry, fashion, film, food, comedy and all sorts of places in between and way beyond, and the legacy and special memories we have all created will remain for many years to come. We have forged friendships that will never end.
From the beginning, the Festival aimed to create surprises, unexpected moments and collaborations that marked it out from others (we’re still slightly in awe of Martin Scorsese choosing the films for our open air cinema, Kate Winslet reading children’s stories on a Sunday morning, Ralph Steadman appearing as Hunter S. Thompson, Teri Hatcher teaching us all how to survive in the wild, Grayson Perry charging on site in his customised pink motorbike).
We have celebrated the compelling and countercultural, the weird and wonderful and the thoughtful and progressive. The Festival team has always been passionate about compiling the best line-up and bringing the finest party to Cornwall.
We are thankful to everybody that has come together to make the Festival what it is. We are very proud of what we have all created together.
We sincerely hope to return one day in the future, but in the meantime we are determined that this year’s festival will be the greatest we’ve ever staged. See you all in two weeks for one big old celebration.