After American singing phenomenon Taylor Swift’s summer-defining eight sell-out concerts at Wembley as part of her Eras tour, Mark Rowe remarks on how security and stewarding at Wembley was next to invisible – which is as it should be.
If you take a minute to watch some of the many videos by fans from their phone footage of the concerts, the trained eye can see Security. Where the more dedicated fans have stood nearest the stage, where almost every fan has their hands above their head to take video, you can spot the pit stewards between the barriers at the front of the audience and the stage. Those stewards wear black t-shirts, because, especially as north London turns to night, the last thing spectators want is anything spoiling their view. Security, is there if needed; only the young have the stamina to stand six hours or more, without prospect of getting extra water or going to the toilet, unless they want to give up their prized place at the front; and they might become dehydrated, or distressed and need rescue. In the seating of the stadium, stewards on duty at the stairwells wear orange bibs, to be visible.
Wembley and other such stadia have done all this, many times before. They are ready for, or have got through before, most contingencies and weathers (it drizzled a few minutes on Taylor Swift on Monday). Her fans are a law-abiding bunch, which makes any disobedience by them all the more noteworthy. Such as when the first arrivals – at 4pm, before the first of two support acts begins at 4.55pm – are asked not to run, as they make their way onto what is the field of play for sporting events, to take a place at the very front. It’s the same at any open-air pop festival – try telling some to slow down, who have no thoughts for who they might collide with. They can only think of the chance that tonight Taylor Swift might – as she always does, by tradition – hand her hat to someone. Where artist meets audience – there is risk always, even though the last thing fans want to do is cause harm by crushing. Yet that emotional and physical connection matters so much it trumps safety and security. One thinks of when Bono pulled a woman out of the crowd at Wembley to embrace at Live Aid, at Wembley in 1984; and of the rubber dinghy that a member of Rammstein climbs into and sails over a sea of heads of the crowd in concert whenever the German band plays Seemann.
Perhaps all the videoing on personal devices is fans’ way of connecting, then posting on Facebook (‘it wouldn’t load all mine’, a fan there on Monday told me), YouTube, or the live-streaming site Twitch; another phenomenon. Look at any time and someone, somewhere, is viewing video of gamers playing online football or other games. At least some Taylor Swift fans go to the extreme of filming themselves for hours even going to the concert; walking through Waterloo station; buying goods in a Sainsbury’s convenience store; walking the pavement. While that does expose them to the risk of street robbery, at least they (and those gamers, presumably sitting at home or someone else’s) are not the youths who all school holiday hang around shopping centres, bothering the security officers, and bus drivers and passengers on the way there and back (pictured, Bidvest Noonan travel security officers at Barnsley Interchange having addressed some loitering boys and girls a weekday afternoon last week). Nor are Taylor Swift fans the sort to zonk out on the floor outside some branch of Subway (as I also witnessed at the Interchange) and be escorted out to the street by someone in uniform, as an evidently everyday occurrence.
‘Chaos’ the Monday fan called the exiting of Wembley. That word of his was unfair; his way of describing what he had never seen before – his one other stadium visit has been to the National Indoor Arena, Birmingham, not the same scale he agreed). Rather, we should wonder at how orderly 80,000 people are, flowing into the wider city, as any stadium football or other crowd does. He did note the stewards carrying signs, like lollipop crossing keepers outside schools, to regulate the traffic outside the stadium. He did raise a point that the UK official National Protective Security Authority (NPSA) has addressed in its guidance on mitigating the terror threat at venues ‘during ingress and egress’, as featured in the August edition of Professional Security Magazine. At 10.30pm, 80,000-plus people had to break the spell and leave, queueing the length of Wembley Way for the Wembley Park Tube station. Again, for Wembley this is routine (for the Monday fan, his first time). But the counter-terror or plain personal safety risk is that the ‘crowded place’ (to use the old CT jargon) moves outside the stadium’s footprint, with all its physical security and stewarding, and necessarily in the open, until fans reach buses and trains (if Transport for London shuts for the night before all the fans are away, they could be waiting some time!?) or their parents’ waiting car (a risk being if a fan can’t get a phone signal and finalise their pick-up – mobile phone operator EE’s name is all over Wembley as a sponsor – good luck getting a signal if you use another operator).
TfL incidentally recorded a peak of 153,727 entries and exits to that single station, Wembley Park, on Friday, August 16. Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan thanked ‘the police and security staff in London for all their work in making sure the events went ahead safely’.
Because it’s taken for granted, too seldom does Security and policing get credited for a job well done – that people have a safe and uneventful (from a crime point of view) night out. Perhaps in that invisibility lies Security’s ultimate professionalism.
