Boomtown Fair, UK, Festival Site Planning & Event Design

Boomtown Fair is one of the most ambitious and creatively complex festivals in the UK, and as it grew, its site planning needed to catch up. The maps and logistics tools being used weren't precise enough to meet the safety and operational standards required by fire, police, and local authority stakeholders. I was brought in to fix that from the ground up.

Using LiDAR survey data as the base, a fully accurate site model was built in CAD that captured the real topography and boundaries of the festival site. From that foundation, a custom library of objects was developed, Heras fencing panels, stalls, stages, lighting rigs, fire points, welfare units, and more, all drawn to exact scale. This meant that for the first time, the production and creative teams could lay out every element of the festival with confidence, knowing that fire lanes met clearance requirements, that stages were correctly positioned and oriented for acoustic management, and that emergency access routes were genuinely viable.

The accuracy improvement also had a direct commercial impact. Supplier quantities could be calculated from the model rather than estimated, making quotations faster, more reliable, and significantly more competitive.

Over a three-year period, full training was delivered to the Boomtown team, bringing new members up to speed and giving them the skills to develop the system themselves. By the end of that process, the team had taken ownership entirely, building on the original model to add GPS positioning for live site management and 3D site data for use by stakeholders and event planners.