The most important part of planning an event is undoubtedly safety; you can plan the most amazing event but if things are unsafe then you are looking at ruining all of that excellent work.
I didn’t have a large role in the planning of our live event as I was absent for a portion of the project but I did have a few important tasks to do: I researched minimum aisle sizes and minimum distance from speakers.
For minimum aisle size, I wasn’t able to find any legal requirements on aisle size, only strong recommendations. For our event where we may have upwards of 160 people in attendance, the source I found recommended a minimum width of 1050mm. This source is ABTT’s Technical Standards for Places of Entertainment (also known as “the Yellow Book”) [1]. Although it isn’t legally binding, many local authorities have chosen to abide by the standards set out within the document, unfortunately I could not find if Bradford Council operates within the bounds of the Yellow Book. However, we should still be following this guideline in the interest of safety.
As for the minimum distance from the speakers, we have a similar scenario where we find ourselves with no specific legislation to follow. However, we do have strong recommendations from the government’s HSE branch in their noise limits guidance [2].
Ideally we would have our audience members at least 3m away from any loudspeaker but, as this is such a small venue, we are to follow the alternative guidelines. Those guidelines being a minimum distance of 1m, which should be very easily applied. We can also ensure that the noise levels do not breach 107dB.