Rain-hit Bluedot to take fallow year to allow site recovery, organisers say

A festival which was hit by torrential rain in July will "take a fallow year" in 2024 to allow its site to "recover and regenerate", organisers have said.

Bluedot, which is held at Cheshire's Jodrell Bank Observatory, had to cancel day tickets and restrict access to this year's event as conditions worsened.

A representative said the festival weekend saw the highest level of July rainfall ever recorded at the site.

They said as a result, it "desperately" needed "some time to recover".

Since launching in 2016, six editions of the four-day event, which celebrates science, music and arts, have taken place around the site's iconic Lovell Telescope.

Its line-ups have seen the likes of astronauts Helen Sharman and Tim Peake, physicists Brian Cox and Jim Al-Khalili and comedians Nish Kumar and Lolly Adefope rub shoulders with music stars like Jean-Michel Jarre, Bjork, Kraftwerk and New Order.

This year's event, which ran from 20 to 23 July, saw headline sets from Grace Jones, Pavement and Roisin Murphy, but organisers were forced to cancel all day tickets on the final day and ban weekend pass holders who had left the site from returning by car as many areas of the site became waterlogged and impassable.

Explaining the decision to "take a fallow year" in 2024, a festival representative said its mission was one of "sincere love and respect for the earth and environment we are lucky to be part of" and the site had taken "a lot of strain".

"This July, that earth itself took a lot of strain," they said.

They said organisers had "patiently waited" to see what the effects of the record rainfall "have been on the land itself", but had now "sadly reached the judgement that the ground on which the Bluedot universe is built desperately needs some time to recover".

They said it needed "a period of rest during which the soil will recover and regenerate", adding, in reference to the scientist who coined the phrase that inspired the festival's name: "We are, as Carl Sagan put it, in very bad trouble if we don't understand the planet we're trying to save."

They said they had "had grand ambitions for our 2024 edition", but were "nonetheless excited for the future", adding: "Our journey is not yet complete."

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