Glastonbury Festival 2020 cancelled due to coronavirus

This year's 50th anniversary Glastonbury Festival has been cancelled due to the ongoing coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic.

In the statement, the festival organisers, father and daughter team Michael and Emily Eavis explained, 'We are so sorry to announce this, but Glastonbury 2020 will have to be cancelled, and this will be an enforced fallow year for the Festival.

'Clearly this was not a course of action we hoped to take for our 50th anniversary event, but following the new government measures announced this week – and in times of such unprecedented uncertainty – this is now our only viable option."

The statement continued to explain they hoped the situation would be better by the time the festival is due to take place, however, 'We are no longer able to spend the next three months with thousands of crew here on the farm, helping us with the enormous job of building the infrastructure and attractions needed to welcome more than 200,000 people to a temporary city in these fields.

'We would like to send our sincere apologies to the 135,000 people who have already paid a deposit for a Glastonbury 2020 ticket. The balance payments on those tickets were due at the beginning of April and we wanted to make a firm decision before then.'

Glastonbury Festival was due to be headlined by Paul McCartney, Kendrick Lamar and Taylor Swift with artists including Blossoms, Editors, Elbow, Fatboy Slim, Lana Del Rey, The Lightning Seeds, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, Manic Street Preachers, Sam Fender and Thom Yorke among the smorgasbord of artists on the bill.

Emily Eavis revealed the Glastonbury line-up just six days ago, however this was before the government stepped up its response in fighting coronavirus.

At the time of writing, there have been more than 200,000 cases of coronavirus around the globe and over 8,000 deaths.

• coronavirus