Arena Seating at the heart of St Pancras events effort

The opening of the High Speed 1 service at London St Pancras International saw the cream of the events world, including Arena Seating, work together to create one of the most spectacular launches this country has witnessed in recent years.

Arena Seating’s key role was to provide a temporary seating grandstand three metres above the level of the platform, with the additional challenge of having to position the structure over an eight metre deep void. This needed to be achieved while the station was still being completed by a variety of building contractors who needed as much access underneath the structure as possible.

“We explored a number of different concepts,” says Arena Seating’s Account Director and Project Manager, Bradley Merchant. “We have previously worked with staging company ESS who are specialists in this particular area, so we invited them to help provide a solution. In the end they created what could be described as a giant, six legged snooker table structure underneath to support the seating.”

The St Pancras launch required the highest possible production values, so Arena Seating deployed 1,100 of its Diplomat range of seats in two banks, plus 72 Congress chairs for the VIPS. It also provided a range of disability platforms, photographers’ platforms and ancillary structures. “As you’d expect for a launch as prestigious as this, the quality of finish was of the highest standard” Bradley says.

Load in and load out were an additional challenge, given the continuing construction work taking place around the site. “It was like building a ship in a bottle,” says Bradley. “All contractors shared the one entrance, so each truck was unloaded one at a time in a very confined space” and after a build that took six days, Arena Seating was required to strip out the structure within 12 hours.

For Arena Seating, the significance of the St Pancras project lay not only in the technical challenges of the event but in the way the company was able to contribute to the building of a successful team which produced one of the most prestigious launches of the decade.