This year's Vault Festival has been cancelled. The organisers have issued the following statement.
"We have made the gut-wrenching decision to cancel VAULT Festival 2022.
Since the emergence of the Omicron variant, we’ve explored numerous options to still be able to deliver our 10th anniversary Festival safely and successfully, all of which were found to put our staff and artists at risk of being subjected to months of stress, uncertainty, and insurmountable financial vulnerability.
We have to make brave and proactive decisions to prioritise and protect the mental health, wellbeing, and safety of our staff, artists, and audiences. We work with a lot of vulnerable people, for whom participating in the festival is no longer viable in light of the ongoing developments.
We have worked hard over the past 21 months to recover from the devastation caused by the lost week of 2020’s Festival and the full postponement of 2021, towards delivering the safest, fullest, and best version of VAULT Festival 2022 – our 10th anniversary year – which was set to be our most exciting Festival to date.
The challenges posed by Covid-19 have been at the forefront of our planning throughout our preparations and we’ve undertaken extensive scenario planning in order to be able to deliver a safe, welcoming, and celebratory event that could overcome them.
It is with broken hearts that we make this statement.
All of our staff, artists, and collaborators have been notified of this announcement prior to this news being shared publicly. We are working hard to support and minimise the financial impact on them, and we’ll be sharing more on this in due course. All existing ticket bookers are being contacted by email.
We ask for your patience while we turn our focus to supporting our staff and artists, and we ask that you continue to treat each other with kindness, respect, and love as we face this challenge together.
We will make a further announcement with more detail as soon as we can."
The festival, which takes place annually near Waterloo station, was due to be the biggest yet and was scheduled to run from 25th January – 20th March 2022. Comedians set to appear included Elf Lyons, Nathan Cassidy, Lew Fitz and Thanyia Moore.
