Events are booming, any season of the UK year, any kind of venue for any reason it seems. Pictured is the entrance to the British Library, which today opened the Harry Potter exhibition that runs at the London NW1 landmark until January.
The Library, like other visitor attractions in the capital has required visitors to have their bags checked at the entrance for some time, as a result of a review of event security after the Paris marauding terror attacks of November 2015, and other similar acts of terrorism in other European cities. A recent addition to the Library’s access control security is body scanning. As set out in a notice to visitors in the queue, they are required to stand on footprints in the floor for their bodies to be scanned by a device fixed to a column.
The British Museum, which similarly runs special exhibitions and cultural events, including in April 2016 for the ASIS Europe annual conference of security managers, has white marquees at either entrance to push the bag searching out of the actual building and increase it’s even security further.
Bag searches airport-style have likewise become the ‘new normal’ at such sites as Alton Towers, and football stadia, again as a result of the Paris attacks which included a bomb attempt against the Stade de France on the outskirts of Paris on the same night as the Bataclan theatre massacre.
Event security steps up a gear
Crowded places remain at risk from acts of terrorism, as the Football Safety Officers Association (FSOA) were reminded at their annual conference early this month, in a presentation from the West Midlands counter terrorism unit.
Last year the stewarding contractor Showsec signed a new five-year sponsorship contract with the FSOA. Showsec as the event stewarding contractor at the Manchester Arena suffered the suicide bomb attack at the Ariana Grande concert in May. Such attacks have further informed event security.
Showsec was the event stewarding and security provider for the V Festival concert weekend at Weston Park on the Shropshire-Staffordshire border, featured in a series of articles in Professional Security from the October 2017 print issue; overall security there included bag searches during the ticket checking at the perimeter to the festival ground proper, and armed police on overt guard at road entrances and outside the venue.
