OPINION
Making big spaces feel human
Drawing on over 15 years of delivering large scale festivals and live music at venues including Printworks London, Drumsheds and the new-for-2026 Magazine Open-Air, Broadwick Live MD Luke Huxham sets out how audience experience at scale is shaped by detail.
How do you create the atmosphere, energy and intimacy of a hundredperson show when there are 10,000 people in front of you? Months before the doors open, a team of people who care about every last detail will work through a sequence of complex decisions to shape how a show lands on the day. At the scale we work at, there is a version of this conversation that treats capacity as the enemy of connection. We don’ t believe that.
Start with how people arrive
The single biggest tone-setter for any night is how people arrive. The first five minutes shape how a crowd carries itself for the rest of the evening, and once you’ ve lost someone at the door, it’ s hard to get that goodwill back.
We think about arrival as part of the experience. How quickly can we take someone from the outside world into our world? Door-to-dancefloor time is a metric we actively design around. That transition – lighting, sound and the physical journey through the space – is part of what we’ re producing.
At Drumsheds, the arrival experience has changed significantly across seasons in direct response to how our audiences move. Early configurations created pressure points in the wrong
Luke Huxham
places. We listened and redesigned. The approach our team takes now is deliberate and sequenced in a way it wasn’ t in year one, because we’ re always learning and evolving.
Design with the building, not against it
Stage placement is the most consequential decision in any space. It determines crowd flow, sightlines, sound coverage and where energy concentrates.
Printworks gave us fixed industrial architecture: columns, mezzanines, a building with its own character and history. The job was to design with it, not against it. Drumsheds is the opposite: an enormous shell that requires you to build the room inside the room. There are no reference points. Rigging points, PA hang positions, the distance from front-ofstage to front-of-house, every variable is open, which means every variable is a decision our team have to make. That’ s where the creativity lives. Our team and partners, many of whom have been with Broadwick Live for years, never look for the obvious solution. They look for the right one.
Magazine Open-Air, launching this summer on Greenwich Peninsula, presents another set of conditions: daylight, weather and outdoor sightlines. The principle doesn’ t change. The audience should feel pulled in, not projected at.
Treat the whole venue as the experience
Bars, toilets, food stalls, smoking areas can’ t be afterthoughts. The average person at a show spends between 30 and 40 per cent interacting with the venue rather than watching the stage. That number pushes us to treat the whole venue as the experience.
Our approach is built on generosity. More bars, more toilets, more queue lanes – because the less time someone spends waiting, the more time they spend enjoying the music. It ' s a principle everyone on our operations team carries into every show.
We model and plan around the moments when movement peaks, like when a set ends and thousands of people head to the bar at once. A bar queue is a decision. So is a poorly placed smoking area.
What stays with people is often the detail: the moment they walked in, how the room sounded, the bar they reached in two minutes. Magazine Open-Air is where we apply all of this again. Big can be human; you just have to design for it.
Silverworks Island
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