Downton Cuckoo Fair

Each year we need about £2,000 to cover the Company’s overhead – for costs such as insurance, lock-up rental and professional fees. It’s more if we also provide the Downton village Christmas tree which we’ve been doing from its introduction. Note it cost the council around £800 for the 2023 tree. So having a Fair every other year would require each Fair to yield twice as much surplus to cover two year’s overheads.

When the Fair was re-started SSE sponsored the Fair for a couple of years. Since then local organisations have paid for adverts in the Day Leaflet and before COVID the commercial venues located within the Fair made donations. However, since COVID these donations have tailed off. We would welcome any organisation that would want to sponsor the Fair – we could work with them to develop their publicity for the Fair’s 18,000 visitors and up to 50,000 Facebook users.

The Cuckoo Fair, as a major event, relies extensively on The Event Industry Forum’s Purple Guide. This sets out best practice for events in the UK and as such defines the benchmark as to what local authority event safety advisory groups are looking for. We’d recommend that other events refer to it as a useful source of advice. It helps us ensure that our Event Management Plan is up to date which is a requirement from our insurers and it is also requested by Wiltshire Council for the road closure. Our other main document is the Build Plan and its annexes. This is our aide memoir and captures what needs to go where and when. We only do the fair once a year and we’d forget stuff if it wasn’t written down! Having a smaller fair won’t necessarily reduce the amount of paperwork we need to manage and deliver the Fair.

If the Fair, remaining in the Borough, became a multi-day one an issue would emerge as to how to secure the stalls overnight. Also, would village residents tolerate the roads being closed over an entire weekend? In previous decades the fair used to have events over the Bank Holiday weekend; these were run by villagers. If you want to put an event on and have the energy and time and a band of volunteers to help then do so – there’s nothing stopping you! It would have to be run as an independent event though.

We’d welcome more variety in the types of stalls. If a villager feels strongly about this then they are very welcome to join the committee and to continue our mission to seek out new local stall holders.

Before COVID we had collection buckets at the three main entrances – ie at The Bull, Tannery Bridge and Trafalgar School side gate. This only raised £200.00 from 18,000 visitors! The local organisations who operate the car parks regularly get push back when the car park fee is collected but it’s only £7 per car which could have 4 people in it.

For several years it was £5 – this was split £3 for the car park organiser (Millenium Green, Trafalgar School and the Football Club) and £2 for the Cuckoo Fair. In 2023 it was increased to £7 and it is planned to increase it for the next Fair to £10 (split £6 : £4). Visitors expect card readers but there’s no reliable mobile network / wi-fi capability where the car parks are. Again there’s been push back from visitors as to why they have to pay a car park fee.

The Fair is held in the centre of the village. There are numerous access points eg Tannery Bridge, The Bull, Trafalgar School side entrance, School Rails, Gravel Close, South Lane, rear of Memorial Gardens. We could close some of these off and setup entrance points at the others. However, they’d need to be manned and have wi-fi access setup (see below). It’s unclear how we’d cater for village residents who live in the village but outside the Fair as we doubt they’d want to pay an entrance fee! Also, members of the public could want to walk through the village or visit the co-op. That said 13,000* people at £10 a head would transform the finances. (* excludes the 5,000 who live in Downton).

Currently the Cuckoo Fair is looking to increase the numbers who volunteer to work on the Committee and effectively organise and run the Fair. We have recently welcomed new key personnel to the Team but we are keen to attract more new volunteers. If anyone can give any of your time to help then please email produce@cuckoofair.co.uk.

We very much hope it’s not the end of the Cuckoo Fair. But we need to make sure it has the active support of the village to continue. It must also be of a form that can be easily delivered year in, year out.

We have estimated conservatively that the Fair enables local societies, schools, churches etc to raise at least £40,000 per Fair. We don’t know how much the businesses that operate within the Fair raise. Raising this large amount in one event means that those clubs and societies don’t have to hold many other fund raising events throughout the year. The Cuckoo Fair aims to raise enough funds to cover the costs of staging the Fair and the annual company overheads.

Our initial research showed that this would cost at least £5,000 to provide. That could be covered by charging every stall holder an additional £25! It would also require access to the actual internet to be provided – if anyone on The Borough (ideally near the centre and ends of the Fair) is willing to share their broadband (preferably full fibre) for the day then please contact us via chair@cuckoofair.co.uk.

A major risk to holding the Fair on the Saturday of the first May Bank Holiday is just that – it’s very early in the year. Climate change is making the winter increasingly wet and in recent Fairs we’ve had major uncertainty around whether the car parks would be in operation and the Greens / Memorial
Gardens firm enough for stalls to be setup. The 2023 Fair incurred additional costs of £668 to mitigate ground conditions. A last minute cancellation would impact the Fair’s income by at least £6,000 and also the village organisations, having bought food to be sold, would have no income to
offset their costs.

All of the village organisations – Football club, Trafalgar School, Primary School, Scouts, Millennium Green, need volunteers to run the events so they can raise the funds. Most of them also need volunteers to support their day to day activities.

The Cuckoo Fair would need two large fields – one for the main car park and one for the actual Fair. This proposal is attractive as the Fair would not require the closure of The Borough which we recognise some residents who live there (and some who don’t live there) object to. We could also look at introducing ticketing which would transform the finances and thus the attractions at the Fair.

A possible downside is that venues located in The Borough would lose out on the significantly increased trade they have due to having about 18,000 visitors on their door-step. In a new secure ticketed location we could also consider a multi-day Fair and new attractions / features. Whatever new location was found it would have to be a permanent home.

We regularly benchmark our fees with other comparable fairs. It is hard to make an exact comparison as most are multi-day or offer larger pitches. There’s a risk that increasing fees will only be payable by the more commercial traders. We also want to attract start-up or local firms rather than people who run stalls as a business. We’ve introduced different fees to encourage this but so far there’s been limited take up.

It is with great sadness and disappointment that the Cuckoo Fair Board of Directors announces that the Downton Cuckoo Fair 2024 will not be held.

Whilst we appreciate that this may come as a surprise to many, given the success of the 2023 Fair, having undertaken a review of this year’s Fair, a number of issues have become clear.

The size and increasing popularity of the Fair means that it cannot continue to operate in the same way or with the same small team of existing volunteers. We work tirelessly to make it happen but are a group, like many other volunteer groups, who are getting older. We are sincerely grateful to all those individuals who have stepped forward to help as a result of our recent recruitment drive. However, subsequently things have changed with the departure of some key experienced members of the core team, including our health and safety lead, for reasons of health, work or family commitments.

Similarly, the popular Dorset Knob Throwing festival, which was also a huge event run entirely by volunteers, was cancelled in January 2022 https://www.facebook.com/DorsetKnobThrowing

To put this in context, we work with a lead in time of at least 7 months, so would be starting to plan now for 2024. To understand what is involved behind the scenes, the Team have to produce and update a 70+ page Event Management Plan and a 150+ page Build Plan which is a huge undertaking to plan and then implement. We also have significant and complex logistics and contract work required across a large community of stall holders and various entertainment groups. All of these processes and documents are necessary for us to demonstrate how we meet the increasing regulatory and statutory requirements with the safety of our visitors of paramount concern.

The draft company accounts from the 2022/23 financial year show that we are around the break-even point. As it is un-ticketed event our income does not increase with growing visitor numbers who also have rising expectations. It looks like the ongoing difficult economic situation, the rise in inflation and the cost of living crisis may only get worse for 2024 onwards. With the known significant additional costs for 2024 and additional requests and requirements from those we needed to work with to hold the Fair this year, the Board has concluded that all of these factors combine to make it untenable for 2024.

We are not the only event in this financial situation and you may be aware that the Great Dorset Steam Fair have also been forced to cancel their event for 2024 https://www.gdsf.co.uk/great-dorset-steam-fair-2024-update/

As organisers of what has become a large-scale major event, we are also acutely aware of the increasing risks, including terrorist threats nationally and the potential impact of those on such an un-ticketed event where we cannot easily control the number of visitors.

We have considered a variety of options to run the Fair next year but sadly the reality is that it would be financially and organisationally challenging for us to run the event in 2024 and cancellation is our only viable option.

This has been an extremely difficult decision to make and we recognise that it will no doubt come as a big blow to those local organisations, groups and societies for whom the Fair is the single biggest fundraising opportunity of the year and would like to send our sincere apologies to them. We are also mindful that there will inevitably be financial implications for the Fair’s contractors, traders, local landowners and our village community. We therefore wanted to give the wider community sufficient notice so that they could plan for their 2024 season without the uncertainty that a later decision would entail.

Going forward we really need more positive support from all parts of the community, including a willingness to engage with or be a part of the event team as well as active involvement in running the Fair or contributions from some of those larger village-based businesses operating within the bounds of the Fair, who benefit financially from a well-organised and well-attended Cuckoo Fair. We are grateful for the financial contributions and donations we received in 2023 from St Laurence church, Downton Motor Club, Downton Primary School, Millenium Green, Trafalgar School and Downton Football Club.

We have run the Fair for and with the village for over 40 years and will be taking some time to look at how we can continue to run it as a high-quality, sustainable Fair with strong and positive village involvement for the next 40 years. As a part of this, we will be creating opportunities for people to have their say on the future of the Fair. Downton wouldn’t be Downton without the Cuckoo Fair!