Our guide to pop-up market stalls for Christmas and winter events

Choosing the right winter event structures starts with the kind of experience you want to create, and there are some real advantages to choosing smaller, individual temporary event structures like market stall tents, gazebos, Christmas market chalets and pagodas. 

Every winter, our GL events team works on Christmas markets, illuminations and events at a whole range of locations, from the historic Piece Hall in Halifax, to beautiful Burghley House, just on the outskirts of Stamford. These events choose market stall tents because they create individual spaces vendors can make their own – and an environment where visitors can enjoy exploring at their own pace. 

These kinds of winter event structures also give you the flexibility to adapt and evolve your plans as you coordinate the large numbers of people taking part in your event.

If you’re looking for pop-up market stall structures, there are lots of options you can hire, from market stall marquees and tents to wooden chalets. Over the years, we’ve worked with a whole range of structures, and we’ve refined a range we believe works really hard for our events. 

Today, that includes four different pop-up market stall style structures (here at GL we call them pagodas). Our pagoda range includes the Garden, Piazza and Ultimate pagodas. They range in size from 3x3m to 10x10m and each one can be installed in less than two hours, helping to make the set-up and take-down of your event quick and easy.

So what’s the difference between them? Well, our Garden pagoda is our simplest, most budget-friendly option. It’s soft sided, ideal for market stalls and easy to link up to more pagodas or other Christmas market structures. Piazza takes the design-factor up a notch with an attractive external roof frame. It’s also soft sided and easily connectable. Our Ultimate pagoda is a more premium pick – a beautiful, structure from Italian designer Giulio Barbieri. This can an be fitted with a choice of rigid side walls, glazed window panels and lockable doors, giving you a lot of flexibility when designing your winter market stalls. To complete the look and entice customers, banner facia rails and banners can be added for bespoke stand branding.

One important thing to consider is how your structure will perform in the winter weather and how flexible the structure will be for your event.  Pop ups do not fair very well when it’s windy and wooden chalets and while they can provide a nice visual, they only tend to only come in limited and standard sizes, reducing your layout options. More on that later. 

Finally, do you need a different temporary structure, depending on the ground conditions at your event? If you’re planning a city centre Christmas market on hardstanding or a winter festival in a field, all our pagodas can be installed on hard standing or staked to soft surfaces and fitted with solid floors. 

Absolutely. If you’re looking to create a long run of individual spaces, hiring a larger structure is another option worth considering. They can easily be divided up into individual retail and catering spaces, potentially simplifying your installation and reducing costs. It’s an approach we’ve used at all sorts of events, including the Hay Festival.

Lots of Christmas markets and winter events happen in busy city centres and market squares, where there might be loading restrictions. To keep things running smoothly, it’s important to collaborate with the local council or landowner and consider access to the site for installation, take-down, vendors and guests. 

Even if you’re using a more spacious greenfield site, winter access can still be an issue. We always recommend laying trackway to protect the ground – and vehicles – as bad weather can quickly make grassy sites muddy and difficult to walk or drive across.

Keeping the public safe is always a priority. At places like the Piece Hall and Burghley House, we work in spaces that are rarely, if ever, completely closed off to the public. So, as part of our event plan, we fence off working areas for safety while structures are going up and coming down.

Talk to your pop-up market stall supplier about event access early in the process and they’ll help you put a plan in place. At GL, we can draw on the expertise of our wider group of companies to provide everything from fencing, signage and power to ballast block safety barriers.

Thanks to the weather, winter events often come with extra challenges. Wind, rain, ice and snow can all make the conditions on site more difficult, potentially causing disruption during installation and take-down, as well as during the event itself. In some cases this can delay structures going up, or mean you have to close your event to the public on certain days.

A good supplier will do everything they can to get ahead of those risks, building time into schedules, installing structures to withstand the weather as well as possible, making additional site visits and having a standby crew available if the conditions take a dramatic turn for the worse. 

Our pagodas and market stalls, can be ballasted and have a much stronger profile than many others. For one major client who’d had to repeatedly close their event to the public, switching to us has meant that despite the weather, they haven’t had to close since.

Yes. Winter days are shorter, leaving fewer daylight hours to install your event structures. It’s something we always build into your schedule to minimise the need for extra lighting on site, but if you need us to work longer days to meet a tight deadline, we’ll need lighting to make that safe and practical. You’ll also need lighting during the event itself to create a safe, inviting environment for your guests and vendors – more on that in a moment.

Winter always brings extra risks, but we’re more than used to dealing with them – and any good event structure supplier should be too. Some structures will stand up to winter weather better than others, so ask your supplier to factor that into their recommendations.

They should also provide all of the safety information you need before your market stalls or pop-up structures are set up, including instructions on how to monitor the weather during the event and what steps to take if things take a turn for the worse.

It’s really important to read those instructions in full and make sure the people on the ground, running your event, are fully briefed too. We’re always happy to talk through the safety steps with you before the event begins, and if conditions become extreme or your structure gets damaged, our standby team can come out to you. For long-running events, we’ll also come and check your structures weekly to make sure everything’s safe and in good shape.

Definitely. We can’t install your event structure without it – no good supplier should. Premiums are always higher for winter events, but we can build insurance into your hire package to make sure you’re covered. If you’d rather arrange your own insurance, we’ll ask to see a copy of your policy before we start, to make sure you’ve got the right level of cover.

At any time of year, but especially during winter, you need power, light and toilet facilities to make your event safe and comfortable for everyone involved. A lot of temporary event structure suppliers outsource those elements, but because we’re part of the wider GL events Group, we can tap into the expertise of our sister teams to bring you one joined-up package.

While our core GL events team can provide toilet facilities to match the scale and budget of your event, our temporary power team Flow Power can bring power, heat and light to all of your winter event structures. As well as keeping people warm, this is also really important for reducing the impact of snow on the roofs of market stall marquees. 

If your pop-up market stalls will be in a city centre, or within an established venue, it might be that there’s mains power infrastructure available. That’s always the preferable option if possible – but if not, generators or batteries can be brought in to give you the power you need. 

Our power team always spend time talking to event planners about their light and heat requirements, as well as anything else that might need power. It’s often the case that some elements of an event are more power hungry than others – for example ice rink chillers or heaters for places where you want people to linger and feel really comfortable. Other elements might not be needed round the clock, so they could be powered-down overnight when you’re closed.

For us, it’s about seeing the whole event like a jigsaw and piecing together what level of power is needed where – and when. Once we’re clear on that, we look at what kind of power source, voltage and sockets will be best for each part of the puzzle, and design a bespoke set up that provides the power you need in a safe, efficient, economical and accessible way.

Clever placemaking and illumination can turn a collection of pop-up market stalls, pagodas or gazebos into a magical, memorable space people want to explore. From Christmas lights to creative installations and themes, it makes a huge difference in the winter months.

We work closely with our team at Field & Lawn to make that happen. They’re experts in festive lighting, illuminations and placemaking who’ve lit up Oxford Street and Covent Garden, as well as creating Christmas lights and lighting trails for towns and cities across the country. We can even use creative event design and CAD drawings to bring it all to life, right from the proposal stage.

It all depends what kind of event you’re organising, and how you’d like it to feel. Individual market stall tents can be easily lit with curtain lighting or string lighting, while walkways can be lit at ground level or with a ceiling of light strung overhead. This helps to create a festive atmosphere and a journey through the event space. You can even project arrows or other motifs along the path so people move through the space the way you want them to. 

A lot of winter events also feature selfie points, which are an easy way to add to the sense of occasion and encourage people to create and share content, raising awareness of your event. Field & Lawn have a whole range of affordable, off-the-shelf selfie options, as well as a design team who can create more premium, bespoke, branded options on demand.

Whatever event you’re planning, it’s always best to start early. So if you’re working on a winter or Christmas market, the absolute best time to start thinking about your market stall tents is the winter before. If your supplier can see your event in action, or take learnings from it immediately after, they’ll be in the best possible place to help you create something even better.

But if you haven’t got a whole year’s run-up, that’s ok. We know that organising Christmas markets often means gauging interest from vendors, stakeholders and sponsors before you can commit to making an actual booking – and we understand that pressure. 

What we always say is, even if you can’t book early, start the conversation early. We can book your pop-up market stalls as little as three to six months before your event, but if we’ve been having conversations with you for a few months before that, we’ll be in a much better position to deliver exactly what you need, smoothly, seamlessly and for the best possible price.

We can also help you think about how your Christmas and winter markets fit into the rest of your annual event calendar, and whether planning ahead means you can reuse or make even more of certain elements throughout the year.

At GL events UK we’re part of a global group with a 5,000-strong team, delivering complex events, all over the world. Here in the UK, we host more than 150 events every year, including several Christmas and winter markets. So, whatever you’re planning next, we’re always happy to talk it through. Just get in touch.