This year’s Swindon Half Marathon will be the last, after organisers said it was too costly to put on.

The event, which was brought back to Swindon in 2016, but this September's event will be the final run.

Organisers say more than £55,000 is needed for road closures and traffic management alone, creating expenses too high to bear.

Graeme Hardie, one of the organisers, said: “When we took this race on at the end of 2016. We wanted to be able to create something a bit special for Swindon, to put it on the running map and to build a race that pulled together the vibrant running community of our town and the surrounding areas.

“Unfortunately we’ve simply not been able to make it work financially with the number of runners that have attended, and the amount of work associated with organising the race has taken over our lives more than we could have ever imagined or expected.

“We are not a big events company just a couple of runners from Swindon who wanted to create a large-scale event that highlighted all the things we love about our town in order to help build up the areas image. We have funded this entirely out of our own pockets.”

The route for the race takes runners 13.1 miles around Swindon’s landmarks including the Magic Roundabout, County Ground and Old Town.

Graeme added: “We’re grateful of Nationwide and all the other companies that have been behind the new Swindon half marathon over our three years.

“We’ve extended our thanks to them, and to the 16 local charities that we have partnered with to set up atmosphere stations along the course to support the runners and bring them some noise and enthusiasm.

“The easy path for us would be to just pull the plug on the 2019 race and refund people before it even happens.

“However, this is not fair to either the runners who have committed so much training or the runners that have raised so much for charity with the aim of completing the course, so this year’s race is definitely still going ahead as planned.”