Dear all,

Thankyou from Daffodil Weekend

A huge thank you for making Daffodil Weekend such a success. It is a massive effort for the village and I am proud to be part of the Thriplow family that pulled this fantastic community event together.

This weekend we welcomed over 10,000 visitors to our beautiful village and had over 500,000 daffodils in bloom. The extended village community really pulled together with over 340 people volunteering (often multiple times) to help. There are obviously too many people to thank individually in this e mail so at the shop I have put up a list showing some of the volunteers – I am sure there were many more. A special thanks must go to the members of the Daffodil Committee from me – they have put in months of preparation and didn’t stop working for the entire weekend.

This year we tried a new traffic management system which seems to have worked well – at one point all of the car parks were at maximum capacity but we had none of the usual queues. We also took a number of measures to minimise the damage to the village (matting on entrances, tidying teams etc) which was expensive but worthwhile.

We are facing issues with people not paying when entering the village, this may be caused by a lack of understanding of how Daffodil Weekend is financed. The up-front cost of running daffodil weekend is approximately £30,000. This covers hire of marquees, toilets, insurance, electricity, heavy horses, attractions. Additional costs were incurred this year for gates, matting and bulbs. Our only income comes from fixed price stall fees, admission fees and revenue from the tea rooms. There is no income generated for Daffodil Weekend by people spending money at the stalls or for car parking itself. There is an increasing problem with people walking into the village thinking that they are avoiding a parking charge and thus not contributing in any way to the costs we incur to run the event. We are looking into ways to solving this but as a first step please spread the word that walking into the village and not paying is directly affecting the amount of money we can contribute to charity – in fact they are taking from our bottom line.

You may have noticed a new willow fence around the village sign to protect our display of Thriplow Gold daffodils. This was constructed for free as part of a working demonstration. However this was not formally authorised by the Parish Council so we are now canvassing village opinion as to whether this feature should remain or we should remove it – please let us know

Next year will be our 50th and will take place on 17/18 March 2018. Ex chairmen Uday and Tim have pulled together a team to plan the 50th celebrations for the village. The provisional date for this is the 6th May 2018 (Bank Holiday weekend). More details of what is happening will follow but please mark these dates in your diaries now both to volunteer and join in the celebration fun.

I feel strongly that Daffodil Weekend is all about building our community, making our village even more beautiful and making our visitors happy. This is why this e mail has focussed on these aspects. However we do also aim to raise money for local charities and good causes. As a result of your fantastic efforts this year we have managed to raise £43,000

Thanks again for all of your hard work!

Best wishes

Paul Earnshaw
Chairman
Thriplow Daffodil Committee