Twenty-six concerts in 19 days marks the start of a busy summer
The end of the football season in May is always a key date in the Stadium calendar.
Primarily it signals the successful end to another season of providing crowd management and traffic management to our clients, with the focus soon switching to preparations for the next campaign.
But as the door closes on football with live matches taking a break, another opens with a busy summer period often led by festivals, concerts and other large-scale sporting events.
That has certainly been the case so far for the Stadium team with 2022 representing one of the busiest summer calendars we’ve ever had.
It has been a non-stop summer for our team and it all began in June, which was an exceptionally busy month for us with 26 concerts in 19 days.
That took us from the very first event on June 4 at Detonate Festival in Nottingham; to the final event on June 22 for Red Hot Chilli Peppers at Emirates Old Trafford, the home of Lancashire County Cricket Club.
Typically over the course of June we would normally support four or five events, but this year concert season has been frantic due to a number of re-scheduled performances following Covid-19, on top of existing touring schedules announced by artists and promoters.
For us it poses a challenge that we relish, and for our staff it offers variety in the work we provide.
Our team were as spread as Liverpool, to Bristol, Norwich and London. Logistically, for most companies, the scale and geographical spread of these events is a test.
Over the course of the 19 days we helped to keep more than 700,000 people safe, deployed 2,000 cones and put up 800 signs as part of our traffic management plans.
We relied on 20 vans, two HGVs, and put on more than 50 staff coaches.
We had a team of more than 700 staff from our vastly experienced pools across areas such as Birmingham, Coventry, Liverpool and Burnley.
And during what has been a hot summer so far, our team used up more than 2,000 litres of water and sun cream to stay hydrated and protected from the sun.
To prepare for such a month takes a huge amount of planning and for us it was around 18 months.
Most of the work is put in before the team on the day have even set foot on site.
That is anything from working out traffic management plans, designing all the traffic management systems, applying for relevant traffic management orders, producing all the signs, getting equipment and vehicles ready, training the staff, planning for staff movements, and devising crowd management plans.
There’s also the additional challenge of working across different types of events, from stadium concerts to ones in greenfields.
Concerts in greenfields typically take longer to plan for that those in stadiums due to the fact systems are not already in place week in and week out.
Key to planning both of these however is site visits. It is vital managers that are running it are there in advance, working with the client to plan on site rather than from a computer.
It has truly been a colossal effort from everybody involved at Stadium to carry out such a significant month for us, but once the engines were fired up there was no stopping us and our team did extremely well.
This work is also really welcome and we need it to keep the staff busy so they are ready for the new season.
A busy summer and 26 concerts in 19 days is not only good for our staff, and us – it is good for our industry.
The industry has come back bigger and better than before, and there’s still so much more to come from us this year.
— Carl Taylor, Managing Director at Stadium