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Universal Praise for AP Security's Baishakhi Mela Debut
The Baishakhi (or Banglatown) Mela is Europe's largest open air Asian festival, with up to 100,000 people descending on the area surrounding London's Brick Lane to celebrate the Bengali New Year. Now in its 18th year, the mix of parades, stalls, funfairs and two live music festival sites is a highly complex event to steward, so for 2009 the organisers brought in the unrivalled expertise and experience of AP Security to help ensure that everything ran smoothly.
Although this is the first year that AP has provided staff for the Mela, the company has a long working relationship with both the Metropolitan Police and the London Borough of Tower Hamlets on a wide range of events.
"Because we have a good working history with both organisations, we understand what they need and vice versa. The council, police and AP all support each other, making for a seamlessly co-ordinated operation," says Adam Scott, AP's head of security at the event.
The Mela covers a couple of square miles and AP's role includes managing phased road closures, crowd management, keeping local residents happy and dealing with the occasional bit of friction between different groups of the youth element, so comprehensive advance preparation is the key and AP's work began way back in January. This included drawing up crowd management plans, attending several pre-event meetings with the organisers, police and local council, careful planning of AP's management / supervision team and meticulous briefing of the 100-strong staff across the event.
"All our staff need to have a very clear understanding of what's require in advance," says Adam. "The rolling road closures are a particularly complex area to manage. It's a busy part of London and, because local people know all the short cuts, we have to be really on the ball to ensure that particular roads are closed - and stay closed - at precise times, but are then opened quickly so there are as few delays to traffic as possible."
"During the planning stages AP strived to incorporate the Stewarding Plan to the Policing Sectors," says A/I Andy Fittes, Metropolitan Police event planning officer. "Each Police Sector had an AP manager assigned to it and all decisions were made in conjunction with the Police Command Team.
"AP's managers are of a very high standard and this proved itself on the day with their quick response to incidents. The stewards deployed were motivated and well briefed and all performed an excellent job on the day."
However, even with the best planning in the world, an event attracting up to 100,000 members of the public will always throw up unexpected challenges and AP's ability to respond quickly, and on the company's own initiative, was key to their success at the Mela.
"At one point there were issues around the Weavers Fields festival site getting too crowded, so AP made one gateway an exit only and redirected people through another gate," says Stephen Murray, head of arts at Tower Hamlets Council. "AP's management team did this on their own initiative which isn't always what you get from security companies. They handled it very efficiently."
"AP produced a really good stewarding plan that was part of our license application and then delivered extremely well on the day," adds Nick Green, the council's senior arts and events manager.
"Most importantly they have an extremely good rapport with the local police, who put a lot of officers into this event. AP also has high quality staff right through the ranks."
This is confirmed by Andy Fittes, who adds, "Without such a professional service the work of the police is that much harder on the day. Instead of being able to concentrate on crime and disorder issues we would have had to deal with many safety factors. The day passed peacefully and safely for all those who attended and this is largely due to AP's hard work."
Although it was a long day for the AP staff - who were on site before 6am and most of whom didn't leave until after 10pm - it was a rewarding experience, with plenty of positive feedback from the public as well as the police and organisers.
"There were no significant problems, it all went very well and everyone has been full of praise for AP," says Stephen Murray. "The quality of the staff is very high - they're well trained, bright, polite and firm when they need to be.
"As a company they are excellent - very professional, reliable and they take on board the multitude of issues we present them with. There are matters of cultural sensitivity and they always need to be flexible on the day, having to come up with additional resources at very short notice if it becomes evident they are needed.
"It makes our lives much easier to know that we can leave them to it and they will keep us informed all the way through."
8th June 2009
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