The Joy of Sets!
The Unexpected Adventures of a site visit: Measurements, Photos, and that one elusive detail.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned in thirty plus years of wandering the globe and going to random venues for site visits, that the client has chosen off plan, it’s that no site visit can completely follow a strict check sheet. That one measurement you forget or the one corner you neglect to photograph, will become that niggle in the back of your mind that will undermine your confidence that you have everything covered.
It is not always what you have missed either, it often is a room that the client post meeting wants to use now and it wasn’t available to see or you didn’t know existed and you must rely on the venue drawing or measurements by hotel staff, as a repeat visit is not always available. It’s an odd sort of cosmic joke, the missed site visit detail, the event Gods seem to conspire to keep us humble and nervy.
So, on a site visit the “journey of discovery” starts. You are often navigating yourself to a new city and a new venue. When you are wandering into a new venue—whether it’s a grand theatre in Sydney, a hidden-up mountain hideaway in the Italian Alps, or a cavernous hall in some geographically challenging Eastern European city, a site visit isn’t just about measurements; it’s an experience that can shape the project and also confirm how close or how far away you are in initial budget estimations.
Like all good adventures, it’s filled with eye-opening surprises, and a fair share of frustration. Every new venue visit has a potential new story—the kind that ends with a “they said what?” or a “wait, what?” These have ranged from me measuring up the Winter Circus in Paris for a fashion show and being told we need to wait for the elephants to rehearse before we can go in the arena, or on a beach in Greece when they said can you come between 3-5 in the afternoon as that is when the tide is out and it is obviously easier to measure the beach then!
When you arrive at a venue for the first time, you try and see everything whilst listening to the walk around guide for any alarm bells, like restrictive working hours or outside traffic restrictions and you try to absorb everything about the environment. The walk around is a good tell on what sort of attitude the venue has to clients and to suppliers. There are two types of venues: those that greet you with open arms—bright, clear, and exactly as expected—and those that require a little more patience, a dash of detective work, and a healthy sense of humour. Sometimes the realisation that relationships need to be built with the in house team and very quickly to get your job done.
Walking through the space, I find myself measuring walls, noting ceiling heights, and mentally visualizing how the show will fit. I take photos—wide shots to capture the overall scale, close-ups of tricky corners, lighting fixtures, and doorways. I speak to venue staff—get the lay of the land, learn about restrictions, licenses, power supplies, access routes, and rigging restrictions. Only later, sifting through your notes, you realize that the one measurement you needed is missing, that’s the first Doh! moment. Of course, with new apps you can measure the room with a video and they are fairly accurate, but a word to the young app minded folks, take some physical measurements, so you have a reference point of accuracy!!
Its not just inside, I have measured carparks, fountains, swimming pools, gardens for marquees, garden walls and greenhouses and topped my career by measuring kerb heights for a ramp for delicate delegates who can’t step up on to a normal height pavement!
Nowadays my site visits are pretty well pre planned and mostly involve long haul flights and hotels and a lot of taxis, but when I had the workshops and we were still building sets, I didn’t always get the advance warning for a site visit, it was very common to go abroad that day or first thing the next and all your plans for the next day, just stopped.
Years ago, when I sang in a male voice choir, I had to do a last minute visit to Germany to a secret site, where one off cars are stored. It was a hectic day of bureaucracy and measuring and I was under the koch for time. I measured and weighed the car to death and had the cab outside waiting for me to take me back to get on essentially the same plane I had arrived on, back to Manchester. It was a full day and underlying this, it was Tuesday, which was choir rehearsal night. Now the jolly old men of the choir who were all retired were always on time, as was I normally, but that day, I was late due to traffic. I mentioned that I had been to Munich for the day and I got stuck in traffic and apologised for being late. The conductor said “Well, on Tuesdays there is nothing more important than choir and maybe you shouldn’t have gone to Germany knowing it was choir night!!” I am sure the client would have taken that well; I can’t go and measure your car last minute as I have choir practice!!
When I was first starting to do this, however, I was much younger and mainly oblivious to where mistakes could lead, if you did a dodgy site visit.
In the late 80’s and early 90’s I was more than used to frequenting the Metropole hotel at the NEC as a freelance carpenter. I had freelanced there for many years for Stage One et al, but I could never remember which was the Kings and which was the Monarch suite. Fast forward to the late 90’s when I was to meet a client at the Metropole and got there as usual, very early. I measured up the Kings Suite and returned to the reception to wait for them. When they arrived, I assured them we could save time as I had measured the room, so they were very pleased with that and as a new client I had made an impression. However, as I am sure you have guessed by now, we proceeded to walk into the Monarch suite!! I of course didn’t let on I had measured the completely wrong room and walked around being asked questions about what would fit and had to blag it, as there was no way with a new client I was fessing up. I even had to pretend to leave the hotel with them in the carpark and then double back on myself and measure the room!! Double Doh!
So, you have returned home, your phone full of photos of venue fronts, empty conference rooms with no character at all, doors and loading bays and chairs with tape measures on and you write the site report. The promised drawings from the venue haven’t arrived yet for you to check the detail, the client is asking for the info so they can progress their end and you start going through the site visit walk around. The slow dawning of realisation that the main mezzanine is not on the drawing on a side elevation and you didn’t measure it as you were told there was a drawing which you either don’t have yet or they don’t have at all! Not sure I am building up the jeopardy like a well written thriller here, but that one detail will dictate so many things, and the plot cannot continue without it. Falling back on the venue for measurements is always the last resort but it is always better than nothing. And there you have it, that niggle that I hope that my needs were understood by the hotel and their measurement is correct as you hand the dimensions over to the designer, what could the possible knock on effects be? Etc, etc. The seed of doubt is sewn, and you have your unsettled feeling back, Hurrah.
Many years on, experience of course should eradicate the rookie mistakes, and they are less nowadays, I promise. I am lucky to travel on behalf of large corporate entities and look at rooms in hotels or arenas all over the world. I can pretty much prep my visit now in a few days and I know what I am looking for when I arrive, ish!
Nowadays some of my visits I do here in Italy, where we are based, are done in Italian. I am pretty good with tech talk and venue talk in Italian, but I read the room when they start looking at each other for,” what did he say” looks and I realise I need to stop speaking. Language of course is only part of the site visit process here. Here the first answer in most venues is usually no, now what do you want. I am never sure whether it is language mangling on my part or the venue general attitude to having corporate events in the venue. It usually takes a little bit of breaking down, firstly the people and then the ideas you are envisaging. It is not the case of you can do what you want here even in larger stadiums etc, they do like a well-timed NO just when you think you are making headway. My job here of course is to try and mediate that with my local teams on behalf of clients and using my local connections here has helped many times when I am not making headway myself. The Italians as a race I find on the whole, are very courteous and generous people when you get to know them, but usually first meeting on a site visit you can count more no’s than yes’s that is for certain.
This week we are preparing for my 5th Olympic games building corporate hospitality environments, I’ll be in Milan, so if anyone is around and fancies a swift aperitivo, which in Milan is the best in Italy in my opinion, please let me know.
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