Next year’s Strawberry Fair, an annual arts and music event which takes place on Midsummer Common in early June, has been cancelled.

The organisers of the volunteer-run event blamed rising costs, which have left the fair running an “unsustainable” deficit.

It is hoped that the fair will return in 2026. The committee has said that they intend to spend the year looking at ways to improve the fair’s ability to raise funds. This includes setting up a GoFundMe page, with a goal of raising £150,000.

Currently the fair does not charge visitors for entry, something the committee describes as “part of the fair’s ethos”. Instead, it raises money from donations, fees paid by vendors, and in recent years funding from the City Council, which the committee described as “massively” helpful.

Despite this, inflation since lockdown has meant that the fair’s costs have grown faster than its sources of revenue.

Liz Nathan, the fair’s committee chair, explained: “We cannot keep continually increasing the fees that we charge our traders and bars for attending the Fair, because they are also facing increasing costs.”

The fair’s decision to cancel in 2025 follows a difficult summer for smaller festivals in the UK. At least 60 festivals were postponed or cancelled this summer, according to the Association of Independent Festivals (AIF). That group’s chief executive, John Rostron, told The Guardian: “Costs have gone through the roof in everything apart from marketing”.

This does not mark the first time that the Strawberry Fair has had difficulties during its 50 year history, however.

In 2020 the fair was forced to take place online, due to the Covid pandemic. In 2021 the fair had to be cancelled again, also because of uncertainty over pandemic-era social distancing regulations.

The organisers also cancelled the fair in 2010, when Cambridge police tried to convince the City Council to deny the fair a licence, due to concerns over drinking, drug abuse, and anti-social behaviour. Though a licence was granted, the fair organisers decided to cancel when the police announced they were appealing that decision.