Brighton Pride is the biggest Pride event in the UK, which is now a two day event over the 5th of August weekend. This year the main event attracted over 57,000 people from the LGBT community with the main headliner Britney Spears bringing Brighton to a standstill.
Pride is one of our oldest customers & we as a company have grown with the event over numerous years from when it started as a one day event with a 10,000 person capacity & 100 toilets. Now they take 500 toilets, over 300 urinals & 10 VIP toilet trailers, this year was an exceptional year for Brighton Pride as Britney Spears ensured the event was sold out, they also chose to run a family day on the Sunday for the first time. For us this meant a very tight window to service the toilets before the next day.
For this we talked with our client in great detail & came up with an overnight servicing plan which entailed 6 x 26ton tankers starting at 11pm at night and working through to 8am in the morning the next day pulling an astounding 110,000 litres of waste from one evening. As you can imagine the toilets were in a very poor state so we also had a 6 person strong cleaning team working overnight to ensure the toilets were, fresh & clean for the family day the next day.
One of the reasons why Wilde Ones use us is because we agree with them a very detailed delivery, service & collection schedule in the weeks leading up to the event with a project manager onsite to run everything according to the schedule. As it is a public park it gets handed back to the council on the Wednesday morning, this means we have 45 transport loads to get out on the Monday & Tuesday with all of the equipment being empty before it is taken away. A tough breakdown but with the right organisation, easy!
Here is a lovely review from the Brighton Pride Event Director, Dean Parker;
“2018 was a game changing year for Brighton Pride.
For the first time, the event was extended to be over two days rather than one, the event site itself was extended both north and south to give extra capacity, and the level of headline act stepped up a majorly with the booking of global pop sensation, Britney Spears.
The increase in workload and the extra challenges this put on the production team and suppliers was considerable. For the supply of toilets from Site Event, this meant a major increase in the number of portaloos being provided, many in new locations, and given that there was no extra build or de-rig time allowed, this certainly put pressure on the whole operation.
The addition of an extra day’s usage for the toilet facilities meant overnight emptying and servicing was now required for some 450 portaloos and eight trailer units. New changes and challenges such as these are often not executed perfectly at the first attempt, but we were delighted that this was not the case for this event. The plan was perfectly executed and needed no intervention at all from the production team.
Despite the best planning, spanners can always be thrown in the works, and this year a rather large one occurred the day before the first show day. At the eleventh hour, (in actual fact it was 3pm), a jobsworth at Southern Water made the unilateral decision that they would not allow access to the nearby sewage plant for Site Event’s tankers, despite the booking being made several months earlier. The nearest other sewage plant was so far away that the operation would not have been completed overnight and the second event day would have been put in jeopardy.
Site Event rose to the challenge, contacting the CEO of Southern Water directly and stressing the potential negative publicity this might cause his company. Needless to say, the situation was resolved, grovelling apologies were made, and the show went ahead as planned!
For us, 2018’s Brighton Pride event was a major success, and Site Event played a major part in it. We’re always loyal to our suppliers and Site Event have never let us down (or similar). We have no hesitation in recommending them for an award for this year, and wish them all the best.
Dean Parker
Wilde Ones “