Prepping Ipswich Town Football Club for a Wonderful Crazy Night

RSK’s scaffolding specialist company, tbf Scaffolding, has had a long and beneficial relationship with Ipswich Town Football Club. The local business and the football club have worked well together for years.

Usually, tbf’s work involves installing scaffolding on residential, commercial or specialist buildings. But in June 2017, the company had an unusual and unexpected request from the Championship club: to help prepare the stadium for an Elton John live show, part of his global Wonderful Crazy Night tour. This marked the first time the star was to perform in Ipswich in over a decade and as such, was a much-anticipated event.

Hosting the concert involved building an 18-foot-wide, 55-foot-deep outdoor stage. The stage normally took about five days to construct and another two days to take down, all of which involved the assistance of a crane, forklifts and a cherry picker. Converting the football stadium to a temporary concert venue in such a short timescale required the tbf team to be agile and responsive. The officials at the club asked us to install a tube and fitting ramp to enable the forklifts to access the pitch easily. The ramp would act as the main bridge to transport the concert materials and equipment to build the enormous stage on which Elton would be performing.

Working to this specific project time frame, the team installed the ramp over three days, including a day of being on standby to ensure there were no issues with the forklifts using the ramp. Both the scaffolding project and the concert were a huge success, with Ipswich Town Football Club hosting a great night’s entertainment for 12,500 people. Once the concert concluded and clean-up crews had set about tidying the pitch, we promptly dismantled the ramp to help return the stadium to hosting football matches.