Site planning

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Revision as of 16:05, 16 April 2013 by WikiSysop (Talk | contribs) (Services)

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Laying out a festival site so that it works well is complicated. Experienced site managers can do it on the fly as the trucks arrive, but if you haven't done it many times before you'll want to plan everything out beforehand.

You will need a site visit to help you make the plan, and ideally you want another site visit close to D-day to check that the venue have not changed anything without telling you.

If you're new to this, try and run your site plan past someone else who has done this a million times before. That's probably Mini Mansell

Services

Your caterers need water and power, your big top needs power, any toilets and showers need water and possibly drainage. The tighter you can group the tents and caterers around the services, the less cabling and piping you will need. If you can use the tents, vehicles and any available buildings to wall in the services, you reduce health and safety problems caused by people tripping on cables, falling down open manholes, playing with the generator and so forth. Tents, vehicles and buildings are all preferable to extra fencing in this respect. Heras is less secure and looks less professional. If you build everything right, you end up with a service area fully enclosed by tents/vehicles/buildings/perimeter.

Big tents are usually fastened down by big tent pegs. If you are putting tents on tarmac you will need to make alternative arrangements (e.g. water bowsers).

You need to run festoon lighting into your campsite, and you want to minimise the amount of festoon you buy and the length of your cable run.

Access

All the suppliers need to be able to get the tents/toilets/etc on site and off again, and the less they have to drive on the grass the better. If it rains you don't want them to get stuck. Once these things are in and the vehicles have left, you may be able to restrict the access somewhat.

During the event, if you have a small generator it may need fuelling. Your toilets may need a pump-out. If you have bands in your marquee, or temporary visiting caterers, they will also need vehicle access. You can open the fence for these people but you don't want to have to move tents, vehicles, etc.

You also need access by fire vehicles to your campsite, including proper fire lanes between the tents.

The people supplying your tents need more space to rig the tents than the footprint of the tents themselves. If you're putting them in a tight space, measure it first and check with the suppliers that the space is enough.

Security

You need to be able to fence the site. If the site has existing fencing or buildings to one or more sides, you may be able to use this, but if you have a heras fence that meets a building and no way to fasten them together, you've got a security problem. Similarly, if your heras fence approaches a bush or a lower fence, this makes it easier for outsiders to approach unseen and to jump the fence. It can be better to leave a wide gap (ten metres) between an existing insecure fence or hedge and your own slightly more secure fencing.

The smaller the perimeter, the easier it is to secure.

If you're in a rough area, having your security guys able to drive around the entire fenced section during the night will help them keep you secure.

You may like to walk the site when you're making your plan, imagining that you are a petty thief and working out how/where you would jump the fence.

Your caterers will want to secure the back of their setup, and marquees and tents may also have vehicles or gas bottles out the back that need securing. Use already available buildings, perimeter fencing or the other caterers/marquees/tents to box them in. The more heras you need to use, the less secure it will be and the less pleasant it will look.

Beware of public footpaths. You have a legal obligation to leave them accessible to the public, and they provide cover for thieves who can approach pretending they are just normal footpath users. If paths widely used by the general public come very close to your campsite access, you increase the risk of opportunistic sneak-ins.

Weather

If it rains during your event, things will get muddy. Mud will track in your hall and your toilets and showers and make everything filthy.

If you can bring pedestrian traffic along paved routes as much as possible, you'll cut down on mud. Similarly, clustering all your food/drink/entertainment in one place cuts down on the traffic. Consider positioning (for example) your bar tent next to your big top with a tunnel, so that traffic between the two stays out of the mud.

If you are able to leave enough width at the entrance area to allow two possible entrances next to each other, you can close one and open the other if the first entrance turns into a swamp.

Ambience

Ideally you want jugglers to be BLOWN AWAY when they enter site. You want the first thing they see when they walk onto the outdoor area to be your "food court" or "food road", or your big top entrance facing them in the distance. Not, if you can avoid it, a sea of other jugglers' tents, and not the toilet block with its associated pong.

Toilets need to be fairly convenient for the bar and big top, otherwise people will piss on your tents. They also need to be far enough away that any smell does not reach the food consumption area. Ideally they should be out of the sightline of people eating food.

To generate the best ambience, you want to create one or two areas where people will naturally congregate, next to traffic paths that bring most of the jugglers past that area regularly. For example, make a wide "food road" around the entrance to the campsite, with space for people to sit outside the bar/caterers or hang about chatting, so everyone going to their tent has to come through. This will also increase the takings of your caterers, for which they will thank you.

Camping

Some events have productively divided their camping into "noisy" and "quiet", or the alternative suggestion of "early noise" and "late noise". While people like quiet camping, they don't like walking far to their tents, and they certainly don't like walking far from their tent to the toilets and showers in the dark.

Noise

The sound system in your bar and big top needs to be pointed away from any local housing, and away from your campsite. Large sound systems are enormously louder from the front than they are from behind.