As Reading Town waves goodbye to the last red haired fan from the last ‘Reading Festival’ as has already been the case with WOMAD due to restricted space, what else will Reading get international, annual recognition for?The organisers of events like the aforementioned know their value in a rapidly expanding and increasingly lucrative market and unfortunately for Reading Town, they need us less than we need them.
Moving the event a few miles down the M4 and renaming it after a letter of the alphabet will do little to dampen profits and may cost the organisers MAMA Group considerably less than £170,000 whereas in the world of entertainment Reading will become as important as Woodstock (Oxfordshire).
There’s no doubt that Reading Borough Council and other land-owners have calculated the immediate profit and loss pertaining to ‘Reading Rock’ including the value of gravel and aggregate, and we can only hope that an amount for the local feel good factor has been taken into account.
I haven’t been to the Festival for about twenty years and have nothing to do with it other than being slightly inconvenienced on the roads during the event but I am proud of the whole thing and would hate to see it go.
Mr Brooman said Womad was leaving the Rivermead site because it has “outgrown the available land”.
He said: “Lack of further space at Rivermead combined with ever-rising production costs has convinced Womad that the future success of the festival must be found on a larger site.
“Unfortunately Reading holds no alternative location where this might be achieved in order to continue with Womad’s successful partnership with RBC.”
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