With 14 UK number one singles in his back catalogue and 10 billion streams on Spotify alone, Ed Sheeran is big news anywhere. His return to his hometown of Ipswich to play for three nights in July 2025 was a headline-grabbing sell-out, and it was SAFECROWDS GROUP’s job to ensure that people left the gig safely when the music ended each night.
With 90,000 people attending Ipswich Town FC’s Portman Road Stadium over the course of the three nights, SAFECROWDS GROUP was brought in to advise on protecting the Zone Ex area between the stadium and the railway station as thousands of people exited the stadium and headed for the train home. Working collaboratively with the venue, Ipswich Borough Council, Suffolk Police, and Greater Anglia Trains, our remit was to provide a hostile vehicle mitigation (HVM) solution that would protect pedestrians during the busy egress period, especially as they queued to board trains.
We carried out a site survey, combining our knowledge of HVM and risk mitigation, with our crowd management and crowd flow dynamics experience to develop a plan. Having presented this to the police and gained their approval for our proposals, we then worked with the police, the rail operator and the highways department to implement the plan.
The project involved installing temporary HVM protection in a total of five locations. We chose to use combination of ARX Stopper! for locations that needed to remain pedestrian permeable, such as the entrance to the station. We then used RB50 for locations that needed the flexibility to allow emergency vehicles through if required, which is always a priority for high profile events and large crowds.
One of the challenges of the deployment was that all the roads surrounding the stadium needed to remain open for as long as possible before the HVM was put in place, so our plan included delivering the equipment in secure stillages at the required location on the morning of the Friday before the first event. Our trained technicians then installed the ARX Stopper! and RB50 in as tested configurations half an hour before the end of each gig, ensuring that they were in place prior to egress.
Once all the crowds had dispersed, our team was there in the early hours of the morning to de-rig both systems in all five locations, returning the HVM equipment to its stillages, ready for re-deployment the following day.
The project ran like clockwork: the solution was 🎶‘Perfect’🎵, the client couldn’t have been 🎶‘Happier’🎵, and as for our team…they’re still basking in the 🎶 ‘Afterglow’🎵!
