Bradford MayDay celebrations 2010
Customer Stories
As celebration of MayDay (International Workers Day) in Bradford had been tailing off in recent years, a group of people from across the city got together many months in advance to plan a revived celebration for 2010.
We got involved in the planning of the event from the very beginning as regular open meetings were held to organise a community event for May 1st, which by good fortune fell on a saturday in 2010.
The outline of the celebration was for their to be a stage set up in Centenary Square for speeches and some live music, and then for a parade through the streets culminating in a picnic and outdoor party at Infirmary Fields.
We offered to set up a catering area, small Solar/bike powered acoustic stage, internet cafe for people to upload photos that they had taken of the day and a PA system to play music over and make announcements.
Whilst celebrations were commencing in Centenary Square, we were busy up at the fields setting up our 20x10ft Gala Tent to house the equipment (since the weather forecast wasn't meant to be as good as it turned out to be).
The event at the fields was intended to be a display of having such an event in a sustainable manner, and so all of the equipment we used was intended to reflect this.
For the catering, the Treehouse Cafe on Great Horton Rd had pre-prepared some large catering pans of Daal and we had collected them from there earlier in the day. To reheat the food, we built and used a large "Rocket Stove" which are highly efficient wood fired stoves.
The internet cafe that we have consists of recycled laptops that have been heavily modified to draw as little power as possible, and these sit on a self contained unit into which we have built into all of the power supply and networking materials required. We have taken this unit to many events around the country including the Glastonbury festival, Hyde Park Unity Day, the Big Green Weekend (Hebden Bridge) and the Camp for Climate Action at Blackheath.
The sound was provided by our Bike Trailer PA, which as the name suggests can be towed by a bicycle which then acts as a power supply once the destination is reached along with several solar panels. Although this system can reach a pretty high volume on it's own, we decided to extend it's capabilities in order to transport the sound across the whole area of the fields more easily by using two of the bass bins from the festival rig. No mains or generator driven power supply was used for this event, it was fully solar powered.
Later in the day, we set up some microphones and acoustic guitars and several local performers played folk songs for the crowds. This was fairly impromptu but we had the equipment with us to make it happen.
As the day drew to a close, we packed down the equipment and headed to the 1in12 club where we were doing the sound engineering with the clubs equipment for a packed audience watching David Rovics and Atilla the Stockbroker.
The whole day was a positive and lively celebration bringing in people from across the North and we have vowed to help make next years MayDay even bigger and better.
