These unprecedented times have led to the decision to postpone this year’s Thame Food Festival. The event will instead take place in September 2021.
This is a decision not taken lightly by the event’s Directors, but one that has been carefully considered while closely watching the state of affairs with the Covid-19 pandemic. A number of factors have been considered to gauge the feasibility and practically of running the event this year. However, this has been deemed impossible due to a number of reasons.
Paramount in making the decision has been the safety of all those attending including visitors, stallholders, volunteers and chefs. The appeal of Thame Food Festival is the hustle and bustle which for obvious current social distancing reasons would be impossible to achieve. Plus, there would be significant additional expense to maintain the required cleanliness standards including more frequent cleaning, wash stations, hand sanitizer and extra security to ensure social distancing measures are not being breached. In addition, there is currently limited government guidance on how events of this scale should be managed, or if they should be held at all.
With lots of great new ideas planned for this year’s event, the vision is to transfer most of these thoughts to 2021’s Thame Food Festival. The Directors of the festival shared their views on this decision:
“This has been a tough decision to make. However, we ultimately have to consider the health and safety of all those that join us. While a number of alternative options have been explored, including potentially holding the event earlier in 2021 it was felt the best solution was to postpone it until September 2021. Hopefully by this time there will be clarity on how events like these can happen. And so while we are extremely disappointed, we will be transferring many of the plans and ideas to next year and look forward to hopefully welcoming everyone then.”
