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There will be no Walthamstow Festival this year after the council withdrew funding to pay for its own Olympic event in July.

The new dance music orientated event, named the Fellowship Festival in honour of artist and designer William Morris, will take place from July 11 to 13.

It will clash with the Leytonstone Festival, the Young People's Carribbean Carnival, the capital's bi-annual Big Dance festival, and London's biggest free festival, The Mayor's Rise event in Finsbury Park.

Chris McMeikan of festival organisers Continental Drifts, which is involved in 80 festivals a year, said: "It's absolute madness. Most councils in London are doing their main gigs on that day. What are they playing at? It's the busiest weekend of the summer."

Walthamstow Festival organisers, volunteers who set up and ran the festival for six years, were told Apex Arts would take over running the festival and invite them to meetings.

But Mr McMeikan, who headed up the Walthamstow Festival Committee, said this had never happened, and now it was too late for the committe to find alternative funders.

He added: "The council's funding was only a third of what the festival cost. The Mall gave us more money and was happy to do so again.

"All Apex Arts did is handed it straight to the council who have done nothing.

"I'm extremely unhappy that Walthamstow Festival is not going to happen this year but in 2009 Walthamstow Festival will be back bigger and better than ever, run by a volunteer committee of local people for local people.

Chairman of Apex Arts, Tim Bennett-Goodman, said putting the festival on at the same time as several others was a deliberate policy to build up "a critical mass" across the five Olympic boroughs in response to the Cultural Olympiad.

"Clashes are not a bad thing," he said. "We have to build on our festivals because there is no new money to pay for the Cultural Olympiad. There's only £1.5m available across the five boroughs, and that will go to a few big events."

He said the vision was to create something on the scale of the Edinburgh Festival in each July running up to 2012.

"I think that's really inspiring, " he said. "As far as Waltham Forest is concerned we are not likely to have any new cultural buildings to use. We have to maximise and make the best of what we already have."

9:11am Tuesday 22nd April 2008

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