A drizzly University of Greenwich was the venue yesterday afternoon for a most informative gathering of researchers and practitioners in the fields of security and resilience, reports Mark Rowe.
The organisers were the London Regional Defence and Security Cluster (formally launched in February as part of a planned set of such regional ‘clusters’ around the UK); and the Security Institute. The audience, largely of consultants, was welcomed by Prof Rodney Day, who chairs the London cluster; who handed over to Aoife Hunt, a professor of crowd safety and security science at the University of Greenwich, and who is co-chair of the Institute’s protective security special interest group (Prossig for short). She introduced Sarah Austerberry, interim chief executive of the Institute, who set out the reason for the clusters, and the event; the bringing together of academia (the ones who do the fundamental research and thinking), business and security practitioners (the ones who apply the research, and who, not least, can provide access for researchers looking to do fieldwork) and government (who set policy frameworks, laws and who regulate).
The six main talks, besides later five-minute more rapid speakers, were duly from academia, besides practitioners such as Ollie Gardiner, who set out safety and security of ‘crowded places’ as the founder of the Portsmouth-based stewarding and event security firm Vespasian Security; and as vice-chair of the industry body the UK Crowd Management Association; and who looked ahead to the coming in of the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025, commonly known as Martyn’s Law, the legal requirement for venues and events to take measures to counter terrorism.
Also covered over the afternoon were resilience, safety and security ‘lessons from Ukraine’; studies of the impact of Hostile Vehicle Mitigation (HVM, such as bollards) on crowds’ speed and flow; the ‘security overlay’ for the RIBA plan of work for architects and others making buildings; and human behaviour when faced with a marauding terrorist attack – the actual sorts of things that people do, and not what Hollywood disaster movies would have you believe; and what security control rooms ought to do in response, given that past terrorist incidents have shown that most casualties occur in the first three minutes. Winding up the afternoon was a good-natured but authoritative talk by Prof Paul Martin, a former head of the UK official CPNI (now the NPSA, the National Protective Security Authority) and author of The Rules of Security (2019) and most recently Insider Risk and Personnel Security (Routledge).
More in the October edition of Professional Security Magazine.
About the London cluster
The cluster like its regional counterparts seeks to take a ‘Team UK’ approach. It plans events into 2026, on such themes as ‘advanced materials’. Visit https://londonrdsc.co.uk/.
