Fever Tree Championship 2019
The Queen’s Club Fever Tree Championship contracted TESS as safety advisors for the fifth year at the historic London club. The international tennis event is an annual pre-cursor to Wimbledon, attracting star names such as Andy Murray and Felicano Lopez, attended by over ten thousand people each day, 17-23 June 2019.
The extensive grandstand seating and majority of venues are temporary infrastructure, so this is a complex build and dismount. Our early priority was developing the strategy for protecting contractors and Queen’s Club members during the build and teardown. The main safety difference we factored in, compared with working at most sporting events and venues, was that the members continue to use all the facilities throughout the whole build and removal periods.
We organised the timed installation of temporary structures to protect the members’ journeys through the construction areas of the site. Working with The Lawn Tennis Association, (LTA) and Queen’s Club we found innovative ways to protect the members whilst still keeping the very tight build schedule. The use of half a marquee from the main entrance meant members could enter the club as normal into a safe zone giving safe access to their club. This also involved collaborative planning and monitoring with the main contractor, Arena Group, throughout the time on site.
We created a safe walking route by constructing a temporary tunnel underneath the main North stand. This was built at the beginning of the build to form a roof over the members to enter and exit for the whole period without fear of seating or marquee teams dropping any equipment on them. A secondary safety route was also designed by our experts to allow the members out to their tennis courts, keeping the members onside, happy and safe.
Our solution driven team was consulted on any changes throughout the year, which included dealing with any creative variations to site layout, grandstand seating or pavilions, before visiting the site two to three times a week to look after workers.
Once the annual ATP World Would Tour event commenced, we were on site for the duration, working with our partners to confidently manage crowd safety. We also become part of the ELT who met twice a day, under the lead of tournament director Stephen Farrow, who is ultimately responsible for overall crowd safety.
Part of our contract was also to provide engineering support for the event and our retained engineers Momentum Engineering, visiting the site every week to make sure the structures were being built to the right specification, in line with pre-submitted engineering calculations, before being signed off.
