The Anatomy of a Festival Site Plan

Every festival begins as a sketch. A field, a stage, a few scribbled arrows on paper. But what feels simple in pencil becomes complex fast. When you add power, water, traders, audiences, and emergency routes, that field becomes a construction site.

At Field Note, we treat live events as exactly that: temporary builds. CAD drawings, CDM regulations, and health & safety aren’t paperwork for the sake of it, they’re the frameworks that turn imagination into something safe, functional, and repeatable.

A good site plan is invisible to the audience. If it works, audiences never think about it. Families move easily between spaces, traders know where to set up, emergency access stays clear. Chaos is managed in the margins, not in the spotlight.

The lesson? Creativity thrives on structure. The best festivals are the ones where detail has been sweated quietly in advance, so when the gates open, all that’s left is the joy of gathering.

Because every project leaves a note behind.