The Qdos Event Hire team was thrilled to return to the Goodwood Estate in 2021 to deliver portable accommodation and welfare facilities for its prestigious events season. Festival of Speed, Qatar Goodwood Festival, Revival and Members’ Meeting were all back on the calendar after their enforced hiatus the previous year because of the global pandemic.
Given the prestigious nature of these events, their size and scale and the quantities of equipment involved, the event operations team require outstanding service and delivery from the Qdos team.
Qdos has supported the events with a single order solution, providing a full and comprehensive range of toilets, showers, disabled wet-rooms, cabins, offices and storage containers throughout the site, since being awarded a multi-year contract in 2015.
In addition to providing equipment, it also manages a range of added value services to complement the products being supplied. These this includes carpenters to build and install over 80 purpose-built access steps and ramps at Festival of Speed, cladding to finish and dress many of the units supplied, daily toilet servicing and LPG Gas for showers.
Over the course of a season working with the Goodwood Group Qdos will supply in excess of 1000 separate items. Units are supplied in a variety of sizes and have multiple uses including: offices for contractors, medical centres, press and media areas and green rooms.
The largest single building provided for Festival of Speed is the 21 Bay Modular Operations Building, this houses all the events operation staff, the Joint Event Control room for the emergency services and ‘Goodwood Control’ which oversees all radio communications. This build is pre-prepped in our yard and then installed on-site within 5 days. For the Revival Meeting, this building is dismantled and moved to the Motor Circuit where it becomes the main costume/make-up facility for the ‘Goodwood Actors Guild’ which provides over 150 themed actors for the Revival Event.
We also provide several bespoke modular buildings to support various functions at the events. At the Festival of Speed these are used to create the ‘Startline’ buildings for both the rally stage and the main track. The latter is supplied in white with a chequered flag wrap to the central boarder. In addition, we also supply a number of event office in black to create the commentators’ box overlooking the track, these are painted every year to ensure they look perfect for the client.
We also provide and manage a range of added value services, these include:
- carpenters to build and install over 80 purpose-built access steps, ramps and cladding to finish and dress units
- Supply and safe install of LPG Gas to all shower blocks and pan washes
- coordination of waste removal/servicing and lifting services
All toilet units are supplied with vanity wash basins, electric lighting, hand towels, soap, toilet rolls and tidy bins. All shower units are gas heated to ensure hot water along with spacious and private changing areas. The toilet and shower facilities are distributed throughout the event site and adjacent campsites.
We have a dedicated project manager for all Goodwood projects, who knows the site well and has a good working relationship with the client. They’re onsite from the outset with responsibility for all installation and full site management support during the build, live days and de-rig of the event.
Once units are operational our project manager works closely with our team of engineers and oversees the servicing and management of the toilets, liaising with the client, cleaners and waste contractor to ensure a consistent and robust service is delivered throughout. This includes the use of specialist equipment and vehicles to assist with the servicing and cleaning of toilet pods in difficult to reach areas and those with restricted access.
In addition to supplying all the temporary accommodation and welfare services outlined above, part of our contract also includes managing the movement of 80+ containers owned by the Goodwood Group. These are used to store the masses of props, furniture and equipment that Goodwood owns to dress its events, they are stored onsite. When an event build begins, we will arrange for the containers to be transported to the correct area of the site, ready for the team at Goodwood to unload. Once the unload is complete we will then return them to where they’re stored and repeat the process once the de-rig begins. This in itself is a huge logistical challenge, for example on this year’s Revival meeting we managed over 128 set-dress container moves. When this is then combined with our other commitments on-site it really demonstrates our ability to manage projects of this scale.
The relationship with Goodwood also continues outside of the core events, where we are called upon to provide on-going temporary facilities.
