Newnham cancels June Event after ticket sales fall short

The College’s biggest May Week event, ‘Summer Soirée’ will no longer go head, its committee announced

The June Event committee announced the cancellation on the event’s Facebook pageLouis Ashworth

by Anna Menin & Isobel Bickersteth

This article is 7 years old

Sunday March 18 2018, 1:07pm

Newnham has become the latest college to cancel its biggest May Week festivity, calling off its June Event due to poor ticket sales.

In a statement released on Facebook yesterday, the June Event’s president, Tara Morrison, said that the decision had been made with “great regret and sadness” and “the Committee is devastated”.

The event, which was being marketed as a ‘Summer Soirée’ with the theme ‘Reverie’, had been scheduled for the 19th June. Attendees were promised the chance to “escape reality and explore an enchanted wilderness at sunset”.

This follows the a spate of other May Week cancellations – Gonville & Caius’s May Ball has been postponed until 2019 due to a combination of “unforseen changes to the committee amidst plans for major kitchen refurbishment at College”, while Trinity Hall was forced to cancel its June Event due to poor ticket sales.

The unusually high number of cancellations have resulted in other colleges’ events trying to attract students now left without an event at their own college through discounts.

Speaking to Varsity, a spokesperson for the Newnham June Event committee said that poor ticket sales had been the “main challenge” faced by the event, and said sales had been “impacted by the date of our event being the same night as John’s and Christ’s May Balls, and also the day following Trinity, Jesus and Clare.”

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The spokesperson also said that the committee had been working to make the ‘Summer Soirée’ a “similar scale of the usual June Event whilst dealing with constraints placed upon us by college mainly due to logistical limitations as a result of the building works happening on college grounds.”

Newnham is currently undergoing extensive building works as the College’s new accommodation block, the Dorothy Garrod building, is constructed.

The June Event had been scheduled to run from 5.30pm to 11pm, with standard tickets costing £65. All ticket holders will be refunded for the full price of their ticket, with Morrison reassuring that the Committee is “working closely with QPay to organise all refunds as quickly as possible”.

The spokesperson added that the cancellation “is not a reflection on what Newnham is able to create, or any future events. Looking back at previous June Events and Garden Parties they are always really great fun, and in the future I see no reason for it to be any different.”

The Newnham MCR Garden Party on the 21st June is still set to go ahead.

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