Bad Manners will headline next year’s Keswick Mountain Festival.
The ska band had been due to perform at this year’s event in May, but the festival was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
It is estimated organisers are facing losses of around £65,000 because of COVID-19.
But event director Nicola Meadley told Keswick town councillors that next year’s Keswick Mountain Festival is on track to go ahead.
She said: “We are very confident in our ability to run a COVID-safe festival,” she said.
She announced that the Skiddaw Vertical Race will be held for the first time in 2021, with flares being lit as runners reached its mountain-top finish.
The largely open-air 2021 festival on May 21-23 will again be run by Triathlon Edinburgh Limited and Durty Events as in 2019 after they took over from Brand Events of London. T
he annual mix of activities, sport, talks and live music had been created in 2007 by Keswick Tourism Association, which ran it until 2014 by when it had become one of the UK’s most popular outdoor festivals, with up to 20,000 people watching acts like former Spice Girl Mel C in 2018.
Despite the current uncertainty over coronavirus, Ms Meadley forecast a bright future and the successful return of the event in seven months.
That was even with the Theatre by the Lake – the festival’s main indoor venue – having been closed since March and still not having announced when it will reopen in 2021.
“We are pretty much planning on running the event as we would have staged it this year. In six months’ time, fingers crossed things are looking a bit better again,” she said, adding that Terry Abraham’s latest film, which had due to be screened on the Friday night, would not go ahead.
The new Skiddaw Vertical Race would start in Fitz Park that evening, with a promotional launch for it provisionally planned for next month.
She described the festival as a “delicate, fragile asset” during last week’s virtual meeting at which Keswick’s mayor Paul Titley offered the town council’s moral backing.
He said: “As far as we are concerned, it is happening and we have got to find a way through,” before adding cautiously: “We don’t have the resources to fall back on.”
Richard Pearson from Triathlon Edinburgh put the festival’s financial shortfall after its relatively late cancellation this year in “many tens of thousands” despite it having made savings.
“There is still a hole,” he said. Ms Meadley added: “£65,000 would bring the 2021 festival into a break-even position in terms of taking on costs from last year.”
One of the festival’s main costs was £16,000 for the main music stage in Crow Park, along with acts to perform on it.
Councillors offered to help organisers access funds from fresh sources, including possibly from water company United Utilities, which is installing a 100km pipeline from Thirlmere to West Cumbria via Keswick costing £300 million over five years until 2022.
