Gloucestershire tradition set to improve

Plans are in progress to make Gloucestershire’s historic Cheese Rolling event even better from next year.

This years event though has still been cancelled.

Expanding into the city centre and streaming videos of the event onto big screens are just some of the possibilities for future events.

A cheese and cider festival could also be held to coincide with the Cooper’s Hill tradition.

At the moment, the plans are in the early stages and may change and develop, but the Cheese Rolling Committee is now confident that the event will go ahead in future years.

The Committee is now being supported by Gloucestershire County Council, Gloucestershire Police, Marketing Gloucester and Gloucestershire First.

While the committee will still organise and run the event, the partnership is helping to manage the issues faced this year and to plan future events.

The decision has been taken to postpone this year’s event because of health and safety and insurance concerns.

Last year’s event attracted 15,000 people – Cooper’s Hill has a capacity of up to 5,000 at most so it was dangerous to continue without making changes.

We need to reduce the number of visitors to Cooper’s Hill and organisers hope that by expanding into the city, people who cannot get onto the hill will still have a chance to be involved.

The statement below is issued on behalf of the partnership.

“Over the years the historic Cheese Rolling on Cooper’s Hill has gone from strength to strength and last year’s event attracted unprecedented numbers of people – something we never expected and were not prepared for.

“We have taken the difficult decision to postpone this year’s event so we can make some changes and improvements to the programme.

“For the past few weeks we have been working together and talking about how we can take this historic event forward and we are now confident that we will be able to go ahead next year and continue well into the future.

“We’re still working on the details but whatever we do we have to make sure we preserve the heritage of the local tradition at the same time as reducing numbers on the hill and this is going to take time to organise properly.

“That doesn’t mean that we haven’t tried to look at ways of putting on the event this year, in fact we explored many options but expert advice was that our plans were not developed well enough to work this year.

“The partners are excited about our vision for the future of Cheese Rolling and we hope that the people of Gloucestershire will be able to enjoy the custom for hundreds of years to come.”