Glastonbury festival has confirmed its 2020 event has been cancelled as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The music festival, which was due to take place on 24-28 June, will now be postponed until 2021.
The event, which usually sees 200,000 people descend on Worthy Farm, Somerset, was due to celebrate its 50th anniversary and had Taylor Swift, Paul McCartney and Kendrick Lamar booked as headliners.
A twitter statement on Wednesday posted by the festival’s organisers, Michael and Emily Eavis, confirmed the event’s cancellation.
It read: “We are so sorry to announce this, but Glastonbury 2020 will have to be cancelled, and this will be an enforced fallow year for the Festival.
“Clearly this was not a course of action we hoped to take for our 50th anniversary event, but following the new government measures announced this week – and in times of such unprecedented uncertainty – this is now our only viable option.
“We very much hope that the situation in the UK will have improved enormously by the end of June. But even if it has, we are no longer able to spend the next three months with thousands of crew here on the farm, helping us with the enormous job of building the infrastructure and attractions needed to welcome more than 200,000 people to a temporary city in these fields.”
The 135,000 festival goers who managed to secure much-coveted tickets to the event will be able to roll their deposit over to next year to guarantee them a spot at the 2021 event.
They will also be offered refunds.
The statement continued: “The cancellation of this year’s Festival will no doubt come as a terrible blow to our incredible crew and volunteers who work so hard to make this event happen.
“There will also inevitably be severe financial implications as a result of this cancellation – not just for us, but also the Festival’s charity partners, suppliers, traders, local landowners and our community.”
The festival had only announced its third and final headliner, LA rapper Kendrick Lamar, last week.
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