Festival Health & Safety: Summer Social
Background
Summer Social returned to Richmond Athletic Ground and The Old Deer Park in June 2024, for a day of competition, music and fun at London's leading fitness and lifestyle festival.
OPS helped the client throughout the advancing, build and live stages of – auditing all suppliers and contractors, before providing onsite Health & Safety to support our sister agency and the production team, The Fair. This was also the second year we provided event operations services such as crowd management, security management, and ingress and egress management.
Challenges
Weather: This was the first time in several years that we had experienced a wet build at Summer Social, with the rain creating additional challenges for all on site. We worked together with our colleagues at The Fair to maintain the best possible ground conditions and avoid delays, while ensuring all work carried out on site went ahead safely.
Infrastructure: A 100m piece of infrastructure was left by previous occupiers of the site, only partially dismantled. Both OPS and The Fair worked around this - making new routes for infrastructure on site and amended the schedule to fit around the infrastructure. We also supervised the structure until it was removed, ensuring crew working around it stayed safe.
Under 18s: This was the first year that Summer Social allowed under 18s to enter the festival since before the pandemic. We therefore worked to ensure DBS checks were carried out, a lost childrens policy was in place, and that everybody knew the procedure if a child was lost or found.
Delivery
On-site health & safety
Operational management
Successful successful, safe and incident free ingress and egress, with minimal disruption to local traffic.
Smooth transition from sports tournament to music event
Results
Another successful 8,000 capacity show
A hugely successful day of festival sport and music with very positive feedback from the client and attendees
We’re looking forward to working with the team in 2024