As long-term partners of Hay Literature Festival, the GL events UK team is proud of our relationship with Hay Festival’s team of event organisers, as well as the diverse range of temporary structures installed by GL events every year in support of the world’s best know literature festival.

We’ve created this film to showcase the role of our people and temporary event hire products in supporting one of GL events UK’s favourite festivals. Our site-team travels to Hay-on-Wye every May, creating a vast temporary event village, comprising 96 diverse and characterful temporary venues that are interconnected by a massive 8,500sqm of covered aisles and walkways.

Hay is quite unique in that the event features temporary structures from across GL events’ entire product range. We create event spaces ranging from vast, hard-sided temporary theatres, a massive temporary food-hall and Hay’s much-loved festival bookshop (which doubles up as the popular authors’ book-signing venue); to smart bars and restaurants with feature roofs, glazed panels, and decked terraces. We install a wide range of marquees, too, from pretty traditional pole tents, to soft-sided retail units for exhibitors, including charities and vintage booksellers.

Hay Festival continues to grow in size and popularity, having successfully established events around the world, attracting imaginative and fun-loving audiences to Hay Festivals produced in Spain, Denmark and South America. With the UK and global experiential economy continuing to drive consumer spending and expectations, many events are benefiting from long-term partnerships with suppliers. This is certainly the case with Hay Festival which, last year, signed a new agreement to extend its partnership with GL events until 2021.

Our video features Peter Curtis, GL events’ Hay Festival Account Manager, and Mick Cresswell, Site Foreman responsible for GL events’ operations at Hay. Both are extremely familiar with the event and the Hay Festival team’s operational requirements, taking a consultative approach that naturally leads to what is described by Fred Wright, Hay Festival’s Site Manager and Designer, as “a fantastic, fluid construction.”

Because of this, and because of our joint commitment to the future of the festival, GL events is able to be extremely flexible, and as Maggie Kerr, Director of Development at Hay Festival comments, the GL events team has become “part of the extended family of the Festival.” We’re proud of this relationship, and of our role in developing Hay Festival’s layout and flow, to the benefit of many thousands of event-goers, year-on-year.