Henley Festival’s
CEO started in
the arts industry
as a stage
manager many
years ago and
has been at
Henley Festival
since 2014
I grew up in the Henley area, but had never been to the festival
before I joined. My remit was to grow the festival, give it
fi nancial resilience and broaden the audience.
We’ve grown by 40% since 2014 and the musical element has
expanded greatly. We’ve bought in comedy, visual arts, sculpture
and street theatre. We now do world music, classical, folk, jazz, and
of course big scale pop.
We’re a charity and we fund other charities so we want lots of
people to experience the event.
Our demographic are older so we’re not marketing to a younger
audience. Our market is 35-75 and older. Generations of families
come, and bring their children.
Some of the older people might not have heard of our headliner
Rita Ora but their younger relatives will have. We also have the
iconic Grace Jones and Nile Rogers with CHIC. Many won’t
immediately know who Nile is, but he is a master producer and
performer who has worked with everyone and he’ll take people
by surprise.
We take over the site of the world famous Henley Royal Regatta,
and there’s a very tight turnaround of 66 hours. We use a lot of
their infrastructure build and erect a stage on the river. We change
most of the Regatta structures and turn it into a music festival.
We work with ES Global Solutions for staging Th ey’re really
good and know how to build a stage on a river. We used to
50 MARCH 2018
use divers, but now we have a pontoon installed by Northern
Pontoon.
Charlotte
aCcEsS ALl AReAs IN THE PUB
PRG handle our lighting and RG Jones handles sound and are one
of the best in the UK and globally, contracted to the Pyramid Stage
at Glastonbury. Arena handles our structures and they also work
with Regatta. We also use a lot of local companies on the ground.
Th e lawn we use is very precious to Regatta and we take great
care with it. We can’t drive on it so we use buggies. When
moving shipping containers in, the no vehicle rule is a challenge.
We keep a lot of regular contractors so as not to put pressure on the
event by introducing new ones.
We’re purely funded by tickets, corporate and commercial
funding.
Our security bill is one of our biggest now. We use a variety of
companies including WH Security who handle a lot of polo and
large scale horse events. After the terror incidents last year we had
to double our security just to let people know we’re doing things
right by them.
We have 7,200 people attending the event, but the site can take
20,000 so we’re well covered. Th e site is long and thin so has a few
pinch points for crowds who tend to all move at the same time.
Our Health & Safety guy Jeff Protheroe is brilliant and let’s us
push the boundaries safely. We don’t want any drunk people
falling in the river!
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