This spring, Emma’s June Event lost out due to lower than anticipated external sales. Then, Sidney’s Midsummer May Week Event was quietly felled late in the day, leaving Trinity Hall’s June Event clinging on precariously. Robinson had long swapped out their May Ball for a ‘mega-bop’. With intercollegiate deals appealing to Hill colleges still not enough to meet external sales targets, committees cut their losses and defer to benevolent larger scale balls offering discount tickets to those affected. Apart from a seeming mass exodus to Downing’s Antony and Cleopatra themed May Ball, what does this mean for 2025’s May Week?

If those more moderate May Week events are now financially inviable, this would mark a blow to accessibility for an already profoundly rarefied Cambridge tradition. The mid-priced May Balls, such as Downing or fresher-favourite Jesus, risk becoming the new baseline purchase for May Week, events which would put a student at least £200 out of pocket. The Garden Party seems to survive at Murray Edwards and Newnham, so perhaps announcing the end to affordability is premature. But, the rash of cancellations in a certain calibre of event is impossible not to notice.

“How does one explain that strange trick of the light that casts what is really a luxury purchase as in fact an essential?”

Trinity and John’s sit unassailable, secured but extortionate. They do not need advertising traction. Instead, students compete to attend. They would surely be any student’s most irrational purchase of the year, whether seventh best party in the world or not, and certainly unexplainable to those outside of the Cambridge orbit. An expectation to drop almost £300 on a single night seems increasingly outdated, especially to anyone trying to justify that financial decision to friends at any other university outside Oxbridge.

How does one explain that strange trick of the light that casts what is really a luxury purchase as in fact an essential? Fear of missing out does much of the work: a May Week with no May Ball is a bleak prospect. But how inclusive can a tradition that makes its student body feel inclined to spend triple figures on an individual night with frankly Hunger Games-esque levels of opulence ever be? And given this alarming trend of events less likely to break the bank being outpriced and outmatched, the exclusivity of May Week seems to be becoming more and more pronounced.

“We could be facing the end of May Week as an experience belonging to all of Cambridge’s student population”

Whilst some motions towards protecting accessibility were made, namely the flood of discount tickets offered to those fallen foul of the Emmanuel June Event cancellation, in actuality these discounts manifested at between £10 at Downing to £13 for Sidney, now obsolete in being itself cancelled. These tickets would still be a loss for any bursary student previously holding the £109 discount ticket, not to mention rendering any plans to make money back by working set-up or committee roles now null and void.

Consensus among the May Week student worker population has been that less jobs are to be had compared to just last year, with committees taking months to offer or decline positions. Within this time, events are cancelled or workers are forced by necessity to accept more punctual offers. Working at June events to subsidise the growing expense of attending those May Balls which survive has become somewhat untenable.

A process where an event can gather momentum enough to be launched and marketed only to be aborted months into its gestation seems a deeply fallible and frankly wasteful practice. The question of compensating the committee, and indeed the various decor subcommittees months deep in paper mache, for a free ticket, only for it never to materialise, is navigated variably and often unsatisfactorily. When a June Event goes under, so too do its dependants for employment and subsidy. This year’s trends certainly constitute a kick in the teeth for any student trying to break even on an unreasonably priced week’s run of events. What remains is a moveable and deeply unstable May Week.

If this is indeed the death of the June event, we could be facing the end of May Week as an experience belonging to all of Cambridge’s student population. Instead, this roster of extortionate events would leave end-of-year revelry the property of those who can afford the £300 price tag of a ticket to Trinity or John’s.

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