The space is set to be home to a variety of independent local businesses
UK - Following an extensive £3m refurbishment, the grade II listed Crewe Market Hall is set to reopen to the public this week (19 May). The space, which has been completely transformed as part of Cheshire East Council’s town centre regeneration programme, is set to be home to a variety of independent local businesses, will feature a new seating area with bespoke tables and chairs as well as a stage which will be used as part of the Market Hall’s exciting calendar of events.
When White Light (WL) was approached by East Cheshire Council to supply a temporary stage for the venue, it turned to Doughty Engineering to deliver the solution.
Paul McLean, project manager at WL, explains: “We were asked to supply the stage for live events that will take place in the Market Hall which could typically be configured as 6m x 6m but with the flexibility to be able to form a number of other configurations such as 4m x 4m and 8m x 4m as required.
“It needed to be modular, compact, lightweight, sturdy and simple for the appointed Crewe Market Management Staff, who are not versed in event industry practices, to quickly and safely assemble for use and disassemble for storage. Doughty’s Easydeck staging system appeared to offer exactly what we needed.”
Easydeck is manufactured in three standard heights – 250mm, 500mm and 750mm with special sizes available on request and with a 500kg per square metre safe working load.
For this particular project, WL required a mixture of off-the-shelf and custom elements. Paul continues; “Most parts are standard – we have 36 1m x 1m stage base supports to 0.7m height, fixing clips to tie the modules together and 36 stage floor ‘lids’ which fit each base, safety hand rails around three sides and two stair access. A custom-made metal valance which fits to all four sides of the stage was required by the client to ensure that the general public (children specifically) can not crawl under the stage.”
While a relatively straight-forward project, the main challenge was to ensure that the packed stage would fit into the available storage space and that the custom valance was simple to install on the stage sides. “As always, Doughty’s Mark Chorley, Laurence Dyer and the rest of the team came up with a decent solution which ticks all these boxes and is flexible enough to allow the client to augment the system cost-effectively without any major headaches,” concludes Paul.

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