Services used on this project;
Victorious Festival is a large scale, 80,000 capacity per day, music and entertainment festival on Southsea Common, Portsmouth. As Portsmouth is a peninsula, the city is surrounded on 3 sides by the English Channel with two main roads accessing the seafront from the A27, one down the eastern side and one down the west.
In addition to this, a campsite for over 5,000 attendees lies just the other side of the A27, as does the Park & Ride element for the event.
Managing the huge increase in traffic and footfall into an already busy port city requires some detailed planning and precise execution!
With three major junctions on the A27 within just over 2.5 miles, extensive signing is required to ensure drivers have adequate information to get to where they need to be, without giving drivers (including non-event traffic) information overload! This was mitigated by utilising symbols across all of the signing on the strategic network. This allowed for all information to be given to the public in a clear and concise manner, without requiring reading text, as they travelled past at 70mph.
Shuttles & Transport Hubs were key to getting tens of thousands of visitors to and from the event. We provided customer service & security teams through one of our trusted network of suppliers, UK Event Associates, to assist and manage the Park & Ride locations as well as the pick up and drop off areas near the event. Our Total Solutions department also provided our bespoke solar CCTV towers with live feeds into the event control room so that the remote operations at the Park & Ride and campsite could be monitored 24/7 throughout the weekend.
With the events seafront location, it was key to keep roads moving around the site so as to not disrupt the many local residents and businesses that reside along the seafront. Our teams were deployed at key locations to manage crossing points from the transport hubs and Southsea Town Centre as they arrived and left the site, with contingency plans in place should there be a sudden rush of people arriving for the afternoon headliners. Thankfully, the good management on the ground was enough so that the contingency plans were not used but it’s always good to have a Plan B!
At the end of each day there was the mammoth task of getting 80,000 people from the festival leaving at the same time in all different directions. Our teams deployed road closures and staff to control a safe space for crowds to move towards their respective destinations, whilst our traffic, customer service and security teams worked cohesively to manage local taxi and bus operations in the town centre, along with the vast amount of people utilising the pick-up areas to collect family and friends. Our well-developed egress plan worked exactly as we wanted with road closures removed half an hour early and all attendees away from site safely and quickly.
“Being a large festival in a small city it’s imperative that our traffic management plan is implemented smoothly, and Lee and the RTS team helped us achieve our most successful weekend so far from a traffic and customer transportation perspective.
Their professionalism, knowledge and expertise were greatly appreciated and their ability to work with both internal and external teams made operations an easy process. The Festivals’ Traffic management team received high praise from Hampshire Constabulary and Portsmouth Council over the weekend, and this couldn’t have been without RTS’s team and all their hard efforts.
We thoroughly enjoy working with Lee and his team and are looking forward to welcoming them back to Victorious Festival over the years to come!”
Shola Hood – Events Executive, Victorious Festivals
