Organisers confirm Elfingrove ice rink will not go ahead for 2023 blaming inflation and ‘skyrocketing prices’

The large ice rink, usually located outside Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, won’t be there this year as organisers confirm they’re putting the event ‘on ice’.

Itison, the events and discount voucher website, has announced that they won’t be running Elfingrove this year. The large scale undercover ice rink, which also had food and drink stalls and a skate up bar, proved a huge hit with families and friends over the festive season for the past few years. Elfingrove, which originally started as a Night at the Museum tour of the iconic museum and gallery in 2019, pivoted to an outdoor ice rink experience in 2021. The team also run GlasGLOW, an annual Halloween light and sound show in the city’s Botanic Gardens.

Oli Norman of itison and founder of Elfingrove said of this year’s pause: “Lots of folk have been in touch over the past week or so asking our plans for Elfingrove. Today we are sharing the news that we are putting Elfingrove on ice for this Christmas coming. A few years ago we made a huge infrastructure investment to create the UK’s biggest and most exciting ice rink with a custom design inspired by the ice tracks I saw when visiting the phenomenal Ice World in Vienna. Over the past couple of years, hundreds of thousands of people have joined us on the rink at Elfingrove set against the spectacular backdrop of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum which looked like a scene straight out of a Christmas film.

“It was amazing to see our vision come to life and set the bar for a Glasgow Christmas experience to rival the likes of Rockefeller Centre in New York - I’m incredibly proud of our team for delivering an event of this scale and magnitude. Large-scale temporary events by their nature require huge levels of investment and in feasibility planning this year, we have been hit by inflation and skyrocketing prices across the supply chain which would have required huge price hikes in order to make the event stack up. We weren’t comfortable in passing these increases onto our customers and as a result we have decided to put this year’s Elfingrove on ice whilst we work on an even more magical new event that will take Glasgow’s Christmas offering to the next level. Next month we kick off with the sixth year of GlasGLOW, in the Botanic Gardens in Glasgow – which is now the UK’s biggest Halloween event. The show is back with an exciting new creative inspired by Ghostbusters and is on track for another sell-out.”