Supportline – summer round up

Cruise ships:

Support for cruise ships is sometimes a challenge as the venue is often doing its best to get away from you! So far this year, we've made scheduled and unscheduled site visits onboard Princess Cruises Star Princess and Ruby Princess. After the end of September, Island Princess and Diamond Princess will be coming into dry dock for their routine dose of fine tuning and TLC from our engineers.

Schools:

Smaller theatres need keeping in tip top condition just as much as the bigger venues. Remedial work and maintenance is scheduled to take place at the European School in Culham and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Theatre:

Theatre continues to be one of the biggest sectors of our support and maintenance department, with several new venues signing up. Inspections and maintenance were carried out at the Macau Cultural Centre earlier in the summer with our team putting in the equivalent of 40 days over a two-week period.

Alongside the usual annual electrical maintenance, our support engineers will be carrying out mechanical inspections and maintenance for the first time at both the Götesborg Stadsteater and Brussels Opera House, requiring around a month's input at the two venues combined.

Closer to home, inspection works on third party lifts and winches at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s Southbank have been completed this week. During the regular two-week maintenance period coming up at Curve in Leicester, we will be servicing Delstar Engineering and Centre Stage axes in addition to Stage Technologies control and mechanical elements.

The support department has recently been appointed in charge of the mechanical maintenance and inspections at the Wales Millennium Centre; the first assessment will take place over a number of weeks in July and August. Later in the year, scheduled work will take place at the Barbican Centre, annual load testing will take place at the Royal Festival Hall and electrical maintenance will be conducted at English National Opera, Royal Opera House, Royal Festival Hall, Teatre Nacional de Catalunya and Rotterdamse Schouwburg.