Secrets of the Eisteddfod
EUROPE’S largest youth cultural festival, the Urdd Eisteddfod, comes to Pencoed next week – and we caught up with its site manager to see how the festival is taking shape.
IT’S no easy feat creating the site for Europe’s largest youth cultural festival.
Indeed a small army of workers and huge amounts of equipment are needed to create the 20-acre Urdd Eisteddfod Maes, which will attract 90,000 people to an array of competitions and cultural displays over five days.
Including the investment in the Maes itself, the Welsh-language youth movement Urdd Gobaith Cymru estimates that hosting the Eisteddfod represents a boost of around £6m to an area.
This year the festival is based on the show ground in Pencoed, near Brid- gend, and site manager Sarah Cole – who organises festivals of all sizes and has been with the Urdd for six years – is in charge of overseeing the creation of what is, in effect, a small town in a little over a month.
This year she has two parcels of land to play with – one is the Maes and the other the Pentre, which will host the fair ground – and, over the last month, more than 30 tented structures have been erected to host everything from the competitions to live TV broadcasts.
“What I like about the Urdd is that it’s somewhere different every year,” said Sarah.
“You just come to a field and think ‘Right, where is everything going to go?’ That’s really nice.
“The Urdd is particularly competition focused so there’s a lot of pressure on people to come in and get their children to the right place.”
This means Sarah has to design a common-sense layout which is easy to navigate and, as such, she always starts by erecting the main pavilion and working out from there.
She said: “To put the whole thing together we’ve used about 2,500 panels of metal, which go on the floor for all of our lorries and cranes that come in.
“We’ve had two cranes in – one lifts the pavilion and cafe roof and the oth- er lifts all of our containers – we’ve got about 10 different types of forklifts and scissor lifts and access equipment on site, we have got nearly 100 people working to put all of the tents up, we have over 30 tented structures on site, we have five kilo- metres of fencing that we’ve used, we have about 300 crowd barriers, about 30 miles of cable, 300 mats for ground protection, 30 litres of paint to get everywhere tidy inside the buildings, 500 panels of timber walling to make the different display areas
that go in the structures – and we have drunk probably a couple of thousand cups of tea along the way.”
The Bridgend TaffEly Urdd Eisteddfod will be held on the Bridgend College Pencoed Campus, between May 29 and June 3.