Leith Festival 2020 postponed

Leith Festival have this afternoon announced that Leith Festival 2020 will be postponed for the time being, due to the Coronavirus pandemic. 

In June, they will consider whether the festival can continue, in some form, in September.

Their statement makes a really important point, that as a community we need something to look forward to and something that will bring us together. We should keep this in mind through the dark days we are currently experiencing.

Their statement said;

As you can imagine, we’ve been giving Leith Festival Gala Day 2020 a lot of thought.

We wanted you all to receive an email ahead of us posting our decision round social media.

We recognised early on that we needed to call off Gala Day for June 2020, but have debated long and hard, and decided to leave the door open for holding an event in September 2020.

This may prove wildly unrealistic, but we will make a final decision in June, when we guess the picture will be a lot clearer for all of us. This could be a fairly simple event such as the Leith Tattoo or the Pageant (more likely), or some kind of Gala Day. Clearly a Gala Day looks implausible right now, it may be forbidden, or clearly not responsible – either to plan for it, or to hold it. 

But we feel we are all going to need things to look forward to, and things that will help bring us all back together, once this difficult, sad and worrying time is past.