Bluedot festival cancels day tickets due to heavy rainfall

Organisers will continue with Sunday's schedule, which includes a performance by Grace Jones

Bluedot festival can no longer accommodate day ticket holders due to heavy rainfall, organisers have said.

Weekend campers, who have been at Jodrell Bank for the three-day music and science festival since Friday, are unaffected but day tickets have been cancelled.

Sunday's schedule, which includes a performance by singer Grace Jones, will continue "but only for people already here", organisers added.

Refunds will be issued.

In a statement posted online, the festival said there had been an "unprecedented amount of rainfall over the past seven days that has seen the water level reach saturation point during the night".

The ground became muddy after a week of rain

Entrances have become impassable due to standing water.

Organisers said that, while they had tried to pump the water out and laid additional track mats and wood chip, it was no longer possible to accommodate more audience vehicles.

The statement said the decision had been made with a "heavy heart", adding: "We are very sad we cannot share this with people who were due to arrive today."

At the scene

Chris Long, BBC News

"Unprecedented rainfall" at Jodrell Bank has made it slippery in the mud and parking is difficult

The site deteriorated gradually throughout the festival but the team behind the event worked hard to try and keep it running in increasingly challenging conditions.

Wood chips, fabric and metal walkways were laid out with varying degrees of success, but a torrential downpour on Saturday evening changed things.

The ground, which was already sodden from a week or so of rain, turned to a slippery quagmire in many places and movement from tent to tent meant braving mud that was deep enough to engulf an entire wellington in places.

Inevitably, it also made for difficult conditions in the car parks, as many of those on day tickets and still more who had given up and decided to go home had to be towed out of the fields.

It meant Pavement's Saturday headline set, the Californian indie rockers' only UK show this year, drew a much smaller crowd than expected or than it deserved.

Most have accepted that the festival's safety first decision is the right one, but some day ticket holders have pointed out that it could have been taken earlier and spared them an unnecessary journey this morning.

Performances continue despite the rain

Organisers sy day ticket holders will "of course" be given a refund

The annual Bluedot festival has been held at Jodrell Bank Observatory in the Cheshire countryside since 2016.

Set up in 1945, the site became a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2019 in honour of its astronomical research.