SUMMER | FEATURE
London in the limelight
Westminster City Council special projects lead Katherine Eaton says the Coronation saw 25 agencies ; including DCMS , Identity , Cabinet Office , Ministry of Defence and Met Police work collaboratively to deliver a hugely complex project .
Words : Christopher Barrett
Off the back of chairing the city operations for Operation London Bridge , and once the Royal Household had given the green light , it was full steam ahead again for Katherine Eaton as she took on a central role in making sure another huge central London event was delivered successfully .
Here she recounts the scale of the Coronation ’ s planning and delivery , which saw Identity work as event managers for the DCMS , countless operators including Power Logistics and Qdos provide their products and services , the military , emergency services and numerous other bodies all pull together harmoniously .
What did your role involve ? Chairing the city operations group , the multi-agency operational level group responsible for bringing everyone together to make sure that the plans and the hundreds of work streams that we were operating all fed to one point .
Who were your key partners on this project ? There was a huge amount of planning with the military ; a lot of work with the equine team , and dealing with requests from the military once they had worked out the processional route with the Royal Household . DCMS was the lead government department , and Identity was contracted by them to be the event management company . We also worked with Royal Parks and all the emergency services ; there were around 40 organisations involved .
Can you give me an idea of the scale of the operation in terms of the number of people that worked on it . That really is a tough one . The meetings I chaired would regularly have 60 people in them , and they were predominantly the operational leads for the individual organisations . I wouldn ’ t like to hazard a guess , but there were certainly hundreds .
How was supplier procurement handled ?
Katherine Eaton
Identity was responsible for a lot of it and , from a council perspective , we used all of our existing contracts in the same way we did for Operation London Bridge .
What was the biggest challenge involved in the project ? The date set by the Royal Household meant we had a relatively short timeframe for something of that magnitude . As with Operation London Bridge , it wasn ’ t a ticketed event so the crowd was a big unknown ; how early would they come and how many . Also , unlike the funeral , this was a celebration , so there were considerations around behaviour . The crowd management worked extremely well .
Were any key lessons learned ? There was a brilliant buy-in from everybody to do multi-agency exercising and testing , and there was a huge commitment to take learnings from that , improve and adapt the plans . There was a shared desire to make the event as brilliant as it could be and to showcase the best of the events industry and the best of London working together to make it a spectacular event for those that attended but also for that global media piece .
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