Official UK Cheese-rolling site

Issued on behalf of the Cheese Rolling Committee, Gloucestershire County Council, Gloucestershire Police, Marketing Gloucester and Gloucestershire First

Gloucestershire tradition set to improve

Plans are in progress to make Gloucestershire’s historic Cheese Rolling event even better from next year.

Expanding into the city centre and streaming videos of the event onto big screens are just some of the possibilities for future events.

A cheese and cider festival could also be held to coincide with the Cooper’s Hill tradition.

At the moment, the plans are in the early stages and may change and develop, but the Cheese Rolling Committee is now confident that the event will go ahead in future years.

The Committee is now being supported by Gloucestershire County Council, Gloucestershire Police, Marketing Gloucester and Gloucestershire First.

While the committee will still organise and run the event, the partnership is helping to manage the issues faced this year and to plan future events.

The decision has been taken to postpone this year’s event because of health and safety and insurance concerns.

Last year’s event attracted 15,000 people – Cooper’s Hill has a capacity of up to 5,000 at most so it was dangerous to continue without making changes.

We need to reduce the number of visitors to Cooper’s Hill and organisers hope that by expanding into the city, people who cannot get onto the hill will still have a chance to be involved.

The statement below is issued on behalf of the partnership.

“Over the years the historic Cheese Rolling on Cooper’s Hill has gone from strength to strength and last year’s event attracted unprecedented numbers of people – something we never expected and were not prepared for.

“We have taken the difficult decision to postpone this year’s event so we can make some changes and improvements to the programme.

“For the past few weeks we have been working together and talking about how we can take this historic event forward and we are now confident that we will be able to go ahead next year and continue well into the future.

“We’re still working on the details but whatever we do we have to make sure we preserve the heritage of the local tradition at the same time as reducing numbers on the hill and this is going to take time to organise properly.

“That doesn’t mean that we haven’t tried to look at ways of putting on the event this year, in fact we explored many options but expert advice was that our plans were not developed well enough to work this year.

“The partners are excited about our vision for the future of Cheese Rolling and we hope that the people of Gloucestershire will be able to enjoy the custom for hundreds of years to come.”

We need some good ideas for bringing down the numbers for next year.

The ideas need to be practical, legal and not too expensive.
If you can help us with some good ideas, it will help next year's event go off properly and ensure the long-term future of the tradition.

The 'all ticket' idea is our best contender so far - selling a limited number of tickets, maybe a big chunk of them to local outlets, then restricting attendance and race entry to those with tickets.
It certainly works for limiting the attendance numbers, but may be difficult to enforce practically, as the site is very accessible via woods and footpaths.  The ticket prices could be very low - just enough to cover the costs of the Marshals (and the cheese!) plus fencing etc.

Other ideas include making the date of the event variable and announcing each year's date only a week before it happens.
Having the event on a week day seems to be ruled out at the moment by difficulties getting the professional First Aid and Emergency volunteers we need at the event.

What do you all think?

There's also a Volunteer page where you can give us your details if you'd like to help out.

The organisers of the Cooper's Hill Cheese Rolling and Wake regret to announce that the 2010 event has been cancelled.

The attendance at the event has far outgrown the location where it has traditionally been held for several hundred years: last year more than 15,000 people tried to attend (according to official estimates) which is more than three times the capacity of the site.

The organisers are working with the local Authorities and Police to control numbers which will enhance:

- crowd safety

- respect for the local community

- emergency vehicle access

- traffic flow on local and trunk roads

The event will be back, in a revised form, in 2011.

ustream.tv might be a way to go.  I'll give it a go today if I can.  The upstream bandwidth from the hill is pretty disappointing, but we could always boost that by aggregating some ADSL connections or adding some 3G connections I guess.

Frederick has asked for more details on when, how and where the event will be broadcast.  My thought was that we'd have the event available to watch in local pubs, and maybe beyond, so people who have too much sense to try and attend the event on the hill can watch it live in a nearby pub in comfort.
There's a slight issue with this - I haven't got a technical solution, the equipment or agreements with any pubs in place to allow this to happen - yet.

So . . .

If you can give me clues on how this done (I understand networking well, Linux, Mac, 802.11, ADSL etc well too)  maybe a web link or howto reference that would be great.
If you want to help with this mini-project and can contribute useful kit, let me know.
If you are a local ISP and can host the server/webcast bit for us, let me know.
If you are a local pub that wants to be part of this, let me know too.

Lots of worries voiced about how the event can be organised and the numbers managed in line with safety concerns.  Hopefully a further meeting in a few weeks with Council and Police reps will bring about an agreed plan.

Should be more news later tonight, after the committee meeting.  Consideration of the Council, Police and Heath & Safety inputs are the main (maybe only) item of discussion.

Bad weather stopped play.  It's a bit snowy up on the hill and after the icy excitement of the last few months, it was felt better to postpone the meeting a week.

Yet more Cheese Rolling websites have appeared.  Which ones are any good?

• This one is the official site of the organising committee.  It's the best site for reliable, up-to-date information but it's very new and doesn't have a huge amount of imagery or historical stuff.
• The www.cheese-rolling.co.uk site is run by a local person with links to the committee and is probably the best for event history.
• The local paper's website is good for local news around the event and is well funded.
• The Wikipedia page has lots of useful stuff on it too.

Others may have something unique to offer, but probably not :-)

Please don't believe any offers or important information from anywhere but this official site.  This is the only website that represents the organisers of the event.