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venue capacity


Paul_Victory

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Oh no my pet gripe LMAO!

Venue capacity is dictated by fire capacity, which is a very liberal rather than conservative estimate. For standing room you an fit two people into every square meter. To imagine this, draw a square on the floor 1m x 1m and plunk two people into it. That's pretty rammed. Seated room is three people for every 2 square meters... The point I am making is that no one in their right mind would exceed fire capacity.

So if a venue was to hold 300 people then it would need to have 150m2 of floor area. That would be umm... 15m x 10m, or 30m x 5m, etc.

Building law also states that everyone must be within 20m of the nearest fire escape. So any building that is dead ended can only be 20m long in total (meaning including the stage, toilets etc). And in order to calculate actual capacity from that footprint you need to subtract things like fire escapes, toilets, the bar(s), stages, stairs, store rooms etc.

Now various people have come on here and trotted out a mixture of the usual urban myths. But if you take the time to roughly pace these venues out, then you'll soon discover that three of those claims are almost double reality. And if you still don't believe me, then check out the operating plans lodged with the local licensing board. The operating plans must by law contain scale drawings produced by a qualified architect incorporating measurements, and that the stated capacity must be calculated from those measurements, there is no way to overstate or understate the capacity. I know this because I've filled out an operating plan.

I believe that the combined capacity of both Tunnels would be around the 300 mark.

At a rough guess Drummonds capacity is somewhere between 150 and 200.

The Moorings capacity is 190. But if you want me to quote it relative to the urban myth scale then I guess it's around 350 (at the moment) LOL.

See this old chestnut: http://www.aberdeen-music.com/forums/other-clubs-venues/52516-venue-capacities.html

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The thing about Drummonds is it looks massive cos it's on two floors.

I think my guesses were nae bad. Also, I would have thought the Moorings was a bit bigger than 190 after it's last wee change and the same with your Drummonds quote since the changed bar layout freed more floor space.

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The thing about Drummonds is it looks massive cos it's on two floors.

I think my guesses were nae bad. Also, I would have thought the Moorings was a bit bigger than 190 after it's last wee change and the same with your Drummonds quote since the changed bar layout freed more floor space.

Another way to get your eye in, rather than pace out the floor space is to take a quick head count. When we first took over the bar, back before operating plans existed and it's layout was very different, and capacity considerably lower, we had a totally rammed sell out gig that definitely hit 100% fire capacity. We cold not squeeze another body into the room. People had to form a chain gang in order to get a drink. Someone said to me "Wow you've got 300 people in here", so I stood on the bar and counted heads. Turned out we had around 120 people...

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Good point. I think if venues consistently overestimate capacity it trains you to guess high. Flash- I've just found a thread where you offer to take someone out on a pub crawl with a laser device to calculate the capacity of Aberdeen venues.

Sounds like a decent night. Sometime next week aye?

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Guest idol_wild
busiest show i ever put on in tunnel 1 was dopamine a few years back, even with all teh tables and chairs removed, we had under 200 people and the place was still rather packed.

Was the crowd made up of fatties?

The busiest show I did was Errors in Tunnel 1. About 225 people in the place and there was room for more.

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Guest Gladstone
Was the crowd made up of fatties?

The busiest show I did was Errors in Tunnel 1. About 225 people in the place and there was room for more.

We've once had 120 in Tunnel 1 (The Underkills first ever gig - on a Tuesday night as well!), and it was nothing like full. I mean, not even close. There were hardly any folk down at the front bit. We could comfortably have doubled that crowd, with room to squeeze a few more in.

Busiest gig I've ever been at in Tunnel 1 was the Maccabees / The Little Kicks. That was pretty close to a sell out I think - I'd be interested to see the actual numbers.

Capacity of Tunnels and Drummonds (according to Hen):

Tunnel 1 - 350

Drummonds - 350

I spoke to him about Drummonds a fair bit because of gigs I'm putting on there. We have 350 tickets on sale for the Alan McGee clubnight in May. The bands that are booked have 300 between them, and I expect the majority of them to be sold. I can't remember how the conversation came about, but at one point, Hen said "I can't sell any more than 350 tickets". So he's quite comfortable selling 350 tickets for Drummonds. I very much doubt that Drummonds are quite happily overselling the venue by nearly double.

And, before anyone comes back and says it's okay because you'll never sell that for a local line up, The Tijuana Sun have already sold their 100 tickets, and Kashmir Red / Vierleft, regularly sell 100+ tickets, so I'm pretty confident the 300 allocation they've got will be sold pre-gig, and they might even want some more.

I'm not saying it will definitely sell out, but I'm confident of at least 300 people buying tickets.

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We've had gigs with a 300 foot fall, but if you actually count the people in the room at any one time it's still within our fire capacity. The reason being that not everyone shows up at 8pm and stays right through till the final chord is struck at 1am. So yes it's possible to sell 300 tickets for a gig in a venue with a sub 200 capacity.

But to reiterate my earlier point. You can only fit 2 people per square meter. That's not just the law, it's a practicality, unless your trying to recreate an approximation of Hillsborough Disaster (which wouldn't be very clever). There are three ways you can check the actual capacity of a venue:

1) Wait until it is rammed and simply count the number of heads.

2) Measure it, which you can do with reasonable accuracy by pacing. In order to hold ~350 people it would require ~175m2 of usable floor space, which would mean: 58x3, 44x4, 35x5, 29x6, 25x7, 22x8, 19x9, 17.5x10, 16x11, 15x12, 13x13... *YAWN*

3) Look up the capacity section of it's operating plan, which was calculated by a qualified architect.

IMO these are more accurate than hearsay, asking a promoter, or counting ticket sales. Although from this point onwards Brian shall inform anyone who asks that our capacity is officially 999. So it must be true :)

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