Outdoor Event Flooring: Tips and Tricks
Are you putting on an event for your community in your local park, playground, or sports field? Then you need the right outdoor event flooring to protect your surfaces and attendees. Excessive mud, uneven ground, and inaccessible surfaces can ruin an event and even put people at the risk of injury.
In our work as outdoor surfacing providers for local councils and private developers across the UK, we have borne witness to the impacts that worn-down or inappropriate surfacing can have on day-to-day park visitation and special event attendance. Refresh your outdoor surfacing ready for hosting your next event with the right surfacing solution for your site.
Provide Accessible Areas with Stable Event Flooring
Public parks need to be open for everyone, of all ages and abilities, to gather. Therefore, accessibility cannot go overlooked in planning for events. You must ensure that prior to deciding on an event space, that it is fully accessible for wheelchairs. After inspection, you may identify stairs, inclines, cracked paving, thin pathways, or unstable ground as obstacles for people that use mobility aids.
It is important that if you discover these accessibility issues in your public park, that you adapt your site to provide better access. The best solution to help ensure your next and future events are fully accessible, as well as improve the day-to-day access people experience of the public space, is a permanent one. While temporary event surfacing is cheaper in the short-term, it quickly deteriorates and leaves behind a mess of broken pieces that cause an even greater hazard.
We recommend the installation of permanent access ramps and stable surfaces for all pathways and meeting points in your park. A durable rubber surface like PlaySmart’s own RubbaSmart wetpour provides the ideal hard surface for improved accessibility, with ramped edges for transition between different areas of the site. Additionally, expert installation with ground-works that encourage proper and effective drainage to inclines can help avoid flooding while smoothing out your park’s topographical challenges.
Reduce the Impact of Mud on Attendees
While accessible pathways are a great addition to any outdoor area, for larger gatherings over a wider area, you will require more ground cover. However, a rubber solution may not be a solution across a larger part of your area of which grass is a key component. You don’t want to sacrifice your sports field or open lawn for one event- nor do you want attendees trudging through mud (an especially common problem when the UK weather turns sour just in time for Bonfire Night and winter celebrations).
Hybrid Grass allows you to maintain your natural grass while avoiding mud during busy periods. When laid out over grass, the artificial grass rolls blend into the natural grass and reinforces soil, avoiding muddy puddles and creating an even green lawn that lasts with minimal upkeep. Additionally, hybrid grass has another benefit by stabilising the ground to further improve accessibility.
For areas at more risk of heavy mud and even flooding, EcoSmart grass mats are another choice to stabilise ground. Designed to add protection to playgrounds, the larger holes may make them unsuitable for some events. However, especially with the addition of SmartPlay underlays, soil subsidence and ground shift is minimised to allow for much safer use of the area.
Also, similarly to Hybrid Grass, after a little time, the mats can blend in with grass as it grows through the holes in the base mats, ultimately creating a flat, secure surface for everyone to enjoy.
Take Safety Precautions in your Public Parks
Providing safe flooring should be a part of your event risk assessment. Not only do safety surfaces limit injuries during trips, slips, and falls, it can also lessen the impact on the legs and feet when people stand, walk and run.
Corkeen safety surfacing combines the natural shock absorption of cork with a unique dual-layer structure of a stable to layer and spongy bottom layer. This keeps attendees comfortable even when standing for longer periods and can even deaden the noise from footsteps that can become overwhelming during larger gatherings on hard tarmac surfaces.
Safety surfacing isn’t just about reducing shock pressure from impact however, it also includes careful consideration of slip resistance and avoiding trip edges all together. With extensive independent testing undertaken for all of our surfaces, PlaySmart achieves relevant safety standards across all of these categories. For more on our safety accreditations you can read our explainer: British Safety Standards: What are the BS EN Rules?
Multi-Use Outdoor Event Flooring
Your event flooring isn’t just a temporary solution for one night, it needs to remain stable and effective for multiple events in all seasons. With PlaySmart’s range of excellently engineered safety surfaces, you and your park can be ready for anything!
To talk with our experts and get a quote for your event flooring or other surfacing and landscaping needs, get in touch! Simply fill out our contact form and we will be happy to discuss your options with you.
