The Platinum Jubilee Pageant was to commemorate The Queen’s 70-year reign with a special extended bank holiday weekend, providing an opportunity for people to celebrate this historic milestone.
The organising company, The Platinum Jubilee Pageant Ltd, made initial contact with Pylon One’s partner Delta Live in early January, to primarily discuss the communications infrastructure for the stage managers along the route of the entire route of the pageant in support of the event production teams. As the project started to evolve, it was quickly apparent that Pylon One’s decades of experience and expertise in providing connectivity solutions, CCTV and WiFi connectivity at other large-scale events, were very desirable to achieve the desired outcomes.
Arcadis were appointed to own the responsibility for the overall event management in addition to the management of overlay services across large parts of central London in support of the weekend of events. Arcadis contacted and appointed Pylon One. Their project manager had worked many times before with the Pylon One team on a number of high profile events and he knew he needed a safe pair of hands, mainly as the project was constantly evolving with new areas being added, almost on a weekly basis! There were now two large scale projects that required a level of service infrastructure, far beyond the initial brief…
Having delivered many large-scale projects, such as the recent COP26 conference and a number of high profile events across the globe, Pylon One were ideally placed to leverage their experience, their contacts and knowledge of similar events, which proved for the Jubilee Pageant, to be unique.
Whilst the two briefs came independent of each other, Pylon One took the approach to combine the two separate elements, and rather than double up on resources, equipment and materials, were able deliver economies of scale to both of our clients and build and deliver one robust solution. This culminated in Pylon One exceeding both clients’ expectations in terms of delivery and the associated costs of the projects and delivering on time.
At the core of the project was a large fibre network, complemented with comprehensive Point 2 Point microwave coverge ; from this, the other services, such as the Emergency Control Room and the media centre, as well as CCTV to monitor entry and exit points to the Pageant, plus all concessions, but particularly those selling alcohol to help the organisers meet their licensing obligations.
The team utilised the roof tops of five buildings in key locations to build the microwave Point 2 Point network ensuring coverage for the various services plus targeted areas requiring Wi-Fi coverage, mainly for the CCTV monitoring the entry and exits. Portland House, Admiralty Arch, Park Lane Hilton and extending out to Hyde Park.
There was a redundant fibre ring around the perimeter of St James Park and Green Park, that linked all of the ‘on the ground’ areas.
One of the challenges the team faced, in providing CCTV cameras in the park area for the concession stands, was meeting the ‘recognition’ element of the ‘DORI Index’ standing for Detection, Observation, Recognition and Identification. In the viewable screen, it was paramount to be able to zoom in and ensure a good facial image could be displayed. Extra cameras were used to enable this to be achieved totalling just under 100 cameras. Whilst they were all HD full Pan, Tilt and Zoom, they were all ‘locked down’ enabling the control to be remotely operated.
Once again Pylon One leveraged their existing technology capabilities, in terms of using the latest products and technologies, but also the number of products that left their warehouse, combined with their experience of delivering large scale public, high attendance events, ensuring the Platinum Jubilee Pageant had the right level of service befitting for Her Majesty and all stakeholders.