18/11/2025
🎅Delivering a safe Christmas for Belfast🎄
In the early hours of Saturday morning, we commenced a significant Event Traffic Management deployment to enable one of the biggest nights of the year for Belfast, the Christmas Lights Switch On 🎁 and Christmas Market 🎡opening for Belfast City Council
Our team was led by our experienced Event Traffic Manager Ruby Unwin-Marris who on the ground with multiple phases of staff working for over 24 hours to keep Belfast running and people safe. This includes enabling roads to stay open during infrastructure building and then closing completed for the large 11,000 strong crowd to enter the event site outside Belfast City Hall.
Ruby was supported by Supervisors Steve Smith, Steve Overton & Ian Baguley as well as Traffic Management Operatives, Traffic Management Stewards and HVM Stewards.
Our deployment included:
✅No Parking Cone deployments across the City Centre 🅿️
✅Multiple Road Closures & Diversions 🚧
✅Bus Lane Suspensions / Closures 🚏
✅Hostile Vehicle Mitigation for the event site & city centre pedestrian areas from Crowdguard ⛐
✅Production load in vehicle routes & lane closures 🚛
✅Creation of safety zones on live lanes for assembling of staging 🏟
✅Fully rated Manta Barrier to protect pedestrians using temporary walkways beside live lanes 🚶🚶🚶
For the first time, the entire footprint and pedestrian area of the City Centre was protected by fully rated Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM) from Crowdguard. Using the versatile H-Stop, this enabled quick and easy closers which maintain 999 access for emergencies, thankfully something we did not need to use on the night!