Pearce Hire moves with Lovebox and Citadel
- Details
For the first time, this year, Gunnersbury Park in West London has seen part of the festival action, hosting Lovebox and Citadel festivals which took place in mid-July. Pearce Hire continued working with their client MAMA Festivals (a Live Nation company) as long term contractor at these festivals, supporting the festival re-location with their temporary power infrastructure and site lighting services.
Jake Vernum, project manager for Pearce Hire, explains: “At Pearce Hire we relish a challenge, and know the team at MAMA Festivals incredibly well - this being our eighth year working with them on these festivals. With a well-established format for Lovebox and Citadel, we needed to ensure that we played our part in providing a seamless transition for these large events as they moved from Victoria Park, East London to West London. We’ve been focused on ensuring we gave exceptional support to the MAMA team throughout the moving process and on-site at this new venue. We are keenly aware that our services were integral to ensuring Lovebox and Citadel offered as good, if not a better experience for the 40,000 festival goers attending each day across the three-day event.”
Gunnersbury Park was an unknown quantity in terms of hosting a major inner-city festival of this size, and so detailed planning for power and site lighting infrastructure was critical from the start of the process. The undertaking was not insignificant - with seven stages, 15 bars and concession facilities, VIP areas, backstage working areas and production village, a small campsite for festival staff, and important brand sponsors (including Corona, Kopparberg and Smirnoff) to accommodate. Plus approx 2,500 crew and staff across the site to ensure the 40,000 daily attendees were safe and well provided for.
Pearce Hire sent in a core team of five, increased to a dozen crew for build and break and spent almost three weeks on site.
“Working across a new site was the biggest challenge this year,” reflects Jake. “The site was really pleasant, and whilst it was smaller in footprint it was very spread out and safety and crowd management was at the top of the list - we needed to ensure our site lighting supported the ingress and egress points and we needed to be flexible in our approach to change things as required by health and safety. We provided x30 tower lights across site and 100% LED festoon to ensure all site areas were sufficiently lit.
“From a power point of view, we had several generator locations with both standalone and full synchronised sets. In total there were forty generators across the site. We really scrutinise the spec from our client and make sure we keep the generator sizes and numbers down to improve efficiencies. And we do all the usual monitoring of power consumption in order to advise on ways to improve consumption and generator provision going forwards.”
MAMA Festival’s production director Dave McCalmont comments: “Pearce Hire’s professional approach to our brief is perfectly pitched. We’ve always considered them to be an integral part of our team, rather than an external contractor. We trust Jake and the team implicitly with the temporary power and site lighting for Lovebox, Citadel, and other events.
(Jim Evans)
