Working with Councils

We work with councils across the UK for events ranging from Bonfire Night to Summer Concerts and Christmas Lights.

For our most recent event we were approached by Coventry, the UK’s City of Culture 2021, to light up the city’s square for their Christmas Lights switch-on. The City Council’s events chief Jon Hogan gave us a particularly demanding brief. Could we fire from the rooftops of buildings overlooking the square with no road closures, no no-go area and absolutely no debris falling into the square. There are very few companies producing what are known as ‘zero fallout’ fireworks and most of these are based in Spain.

We went to Europa, a specialist manufacture of such material, and gave them a brief of our requirement. The show had to be varied in colours and effects so that we could sustain interest and impact through the 4-minute display. Within two weeks we had taken delivery of nearly 1000 fireworks each containing just one shot of stars that would all burn out in the sky. It took us another two weeks to program the display using a vey sophisticated piece of software called Finale 3D, the industry leader for such designs which originates from the USA.

From design we moved to assembly in our workshops where we brought in shifts of pyrotechnicians to fuse the sequences together. On the day three vans, loaded with the show, made their way to the city of Lady Godiva where we ascended many flights of stairs and the occasional lift to get out on to the rooftops. Fortunately it was a clear dry day with little wind, perfect for fireworks in any situation but particularly welcome on such an important occasion. At 7.45pm the Lord Mayor of Coventry began the countdown and as the audience shouted down to zero, the first volley went up and there was a huge cheer. The show continued its Mexican wave from the rooftops until, 4 minutes later, it ended in a sky full of crackling stars. Jon Hogan radio’d to say ‘wow, that was amazing. I never thought you could do it.’ Watch our video of the show highlights and Jon’s video testimonial.