You have the field and the date. Then the supplier asks where the delivery vehicle will stand, and the only flat ground turns out to sit over a drainage run. Outdoor stage hire looks like a product decision and behaves like a site decision, which is why so many of them get made twice. The stage you can have is whichever one the ground and the weather will allow.
What outdoor stage hire actually puts in your hands
Most pages selling this describe a deck, a roof and a list of dimensions. What arrives is a temporary demountable structure: a building that goes up in a day, carries loads while people stand under it, and comes down again. The difference shows up in who has to be competent, and in what happens when the wind gets up on the Saturday afternoon.
Our position, and it applies to audio visual (AV) equipment as much as to staging, is that specifying kit before you understand the event produces the wrong kit. An outdoor stage is the clearest case of that rule there is.
The site decides before the catalogue does
The Health and Safety Executive asks organisers to take account of foreseeable wind loading and factors such as ground strength and slope when selecting outdoor equipment, and to make sure any ballast stays in place for as long as the structure is in use. Ballast is the dead weight, usually water tanks or concrete blocks, that stops a structure lifting or sliding.
So walk the site before anyone draws a stage on a plan. Where water goes after a wet week, what is under the grass, and whether the ground is level enough that the structure is not erected out of plumb, meaning off vertical, which changes the way loads travel through it. Then whether you can pin into the ground at all, because a playing field with services under it means ballast instead, and ballast means more vehicles across soft ground.
Wind is a figure, not a feeling
Every temporary stage roof is designed to a wind loading, and that figure should be written down somewhere you can see it. A safety alert from the Standing Committee on Structural Safety, issued after a run of stage collapses including the Indiana State Fair in 2011, sets out what the paperwork should contain: which wind code the design was carried out to, evidence of the designer’s competence, an independent erection check by a competent person, and a completion certificate confirming the structure was built the way it was designed.
The same alert makes the point that catches organisers out most. End users, it says, may not appreciate that by taking decisions on anchorages they are attracting design responsibilities. Move a ballast block because it sits where you wanted a camera, and you have made a structural decision on behalf of somebody who is insured to make it and you are not.
Who is watching the wind, and who can stop the show
A design figure is only worth having if somebody is measuring against it. The alert is specific: wind speed monitoring equipment must be provided on site when wind is critical to the safety of the structure, and monitored continuously while it is in use. There should be a wind management plan, and if the design wind speeds look likely to be exceeded, that plan says what happens next, up to and including clearing the area.
The part nobody writes down is the name. That plan needs a person: reachable on the night, and holding the authority to drop a roof or pause a performance without ringing three other people first. Nine o’clock on a Saturday evening with an audience in front of the stage is the worst available moment to find that everyone assumed it was somebody else’s decision.
The banner on the front is a sail
Sponsors want their name on the stage and a roof is the obvious place to hang it. Stageline’s own technical drawing for one of its mobile stages tells the user to subtract capacity from two named rigging points to allow for the wind loading from banners.
Read backwards, that is the useful part. Anything with surface area that you hang on a structure competes with the lights and the loudspeakers for what it can carry, and it competes hardest on the windiest day. Drapes and a printed skirt around the deck behave the same way. Branding tends to be confirmed late, so it arrives after the rigging plan was agreed, and a plan revised on site is a plan nobody has checked.
The space in front of the stage
Stage barriers are the other structure on your site, and the HSE treats them accordingly. Its guidance on stage barriers describes sections around 1200mm high and a metre wide, ideally fully welded, with a smooth rounded top rail and a footplate the audience stands on to hold the system in place. Once built, a barrier is only as strong as its weakest link, and it has to be designed for crowd pressure and surges rather than a steady lean.
The detail most worth taking from that page is the shape. A curved barrier gives stewards and first aiders a wider pit to work in and puts distance between the audience and the stage, which makes the stage harder to climb onto. The HSE warns against trapping points and pockets where people can get stuck, which is what happens when a barrier line is drawn to fit the stage instead of the crowd.
The build sequence nobody puts in the brief
Indoors, the get-in, meaning the window when equipment can be brought into a building, is set by a loading door and a lift. Outdoors the limit is the order things have to happen in. Ground protection goes down before any vehicle drives over it. The stage goes up before anything can be hung from it, and the power has to be in and tested before the lighting and the audio can be proved.
Every one of those steps has a weather dependency, so a wet Thursday does not delay one thing, it delays the sequence behind it. The de-rig, the part where the build comes back down, has the same problem in reverse and is usually given half the time the build got. Ask when the structure is signed off as complete and by whom, because that is when it becomes usable, not when the last bolt goes in.
What to settle before you book
Ask who carries out the design and what wind loading it is designed to, then ask to see the erection check and the completion certificate rather than being told they exist. Establish who holds the wind management plan and who is named in it as the person who can act. Agree what happens to the ballast if the stage has to move. Settle the branding deadline alongside the rigging plan, because they are the same conversation whether or not anyone treats them that way.
Where this leaves you
Much of the above overlaps with what to ask any AV supplier and with the indoor staging question, which is gentler because the roof is already there. Outdoors, the argument that one supplier beats three is at its sharpest: the stage and the power are not separate hires that happen to share a postcode. The structure carries the lighting, and the barrier line decides where a cable run can go. When we built sound, lighting, power, infrastructure and staging into the unused Union Street tram station for the AllSaints SS24 show, the site supplied nothing at all. A field is that same problem with weather added, and if a screen is going up too, the same wind and ground questions apply to it.
If you have a date, a site and a rough idea of audience numbers, we are happy to look at it with you, whether that is a festival or an outdoor concert. You can reach us through the contact page or by email at hire@eventproductiongroup.co.uk, and if the site will not take the stage you have in mind, we would rather say so early than on the morning of the build.
