How the Great Yorkshire Show Strengthened Crowd Safety with Temporary CCTV Towers

The 167th Great Yorkshire Show took place in Harrogate this July. For the first time, it added temporary CCTV towers to its crowd-safety setup – four REG Army towers live across the public areas of the Great Yorkshire Show from the moment the gates opened.

For a Fire & Security installer, this is the deployment worth studying. Not because an agricultural show is exotic, but because it is exactly the kind of large, temporary, high-footfall site where a tower either earns its keep or lets down everyone who specified it. England's largest agricultural show, four days, 150,000 visitors, one main arena and a set of entrances that all need eyes on them. When your client is running an event at that scale, “we'll do our best” is not an answer they can take back to their own stakeholders.

Here is what the REG Army did at Harrogate, and why it matters for the sites you cover.

The brief: coverage a permanent system was never built for

The Yorkshire Agricultural Society already has CCTV at the showground. That is the point people miss. The site is not unprotected – it has permanent infrastructure like any working venue. But a showground for most of the year and a showground hosting England's largest agricultural show are two different places.

Once the trade stands go up, the temporary structures land and 150,000 people move through the grounds over four days, the permanent system is covering a site that no longer looks like the one it was designed for. New sightlines, new crowds, new pinch points at the entrances and around the main arena. That is the gap the Society set out to close: not a replacement for what they run all year, but additional coverage shaped to the show itself.

Crowd safety was the driver. At an event, CCTV is less about catching someone after the fact and more about seeing clearly in the moment – keeping eyes on the busiest public areas, where a large crowd most needs watching over.

The deployment: four towers on their own network

Four REG Army towers – REG0009 to REG0012 – went in on 9 July, ready and live for the show opening on the 14th. They were positioned across the public areas, adding temporary coverage for the show's busiest spaces.

Each tower stands 6 metres tall and carries five cameras: four fixed cameras covering the static sightlines, and one PTZ (pan-tilt-zoom) camera that can be driven to follow activity as it happens. For an event, that PTZ is the difference between watching a fixed frame and actually tracking something across a crowd. It was the right fit for this job.

The part installers will appreciate is the bit the public never sees. The four towers were linked to each other with point-to-point Wi-Fi, so the cameras fed back to a single control point rather than sitting as four islands, working alongside the show's own setup. It is exactly the kind of temporary, fast-moving environment a redeployable system is built for – arriving, connecting and coming out again with the event.

And here is a point worth making to any event client: a REG Army deployment runs on its own stand-alone network, so it does not need to be joined to the client's own IT. For an organiser who keeps their network tightly controlled, that is one less approval to chase and one less thing to worry about. You are not asking a client's IT team to let an outside supplier onto their systems, because the tower network stands on its own.

Why it worked: permanent-grade kit in a temporary format

The REG Army is built to one standard, and it does not drop for a temporary site. Every tower is Premium by Design: permanent-grade equipment in a mobile format, with nothing stripped out to hit a price.

That means the things an event actually needs are all there as standard. A PTZ camera alongside the fixed ones, so the control point can follow activity rather than just watch static frames. A stand-alone network, so the system is not dependent on site connectivity. And Dual Power Plus – solar panels and methanol fuel cells backed by battery – so a tower is designed to keep running across four days in July whatever the sky is doing, rather than relying on solar alone. The fleet is built and maintained in-house by Phil and Alex Clarke and the team, with no subcontracting. Last year the REG Army logged 750,000+ operational hours across 350+ sites.

The Great Yorkshire Show is a strong example precisely because it is not a construction site or a vacant yard – the usual home turf for temporary towers. It is a flagship public event, in front of 150,000 visitors and the organisation that has run it since 1838. The towers delivered the additional coverage the Society wanted, across all four days.

What this means for the events you cover

Events are their own discipline. A construction site is quiet and empty when the tower matters most; an event is the opposite – the tower matters most when the site is at its fullest. The coverage has to hold up with tens of thousands of people moving through it, and the kit has to arrive, work and leave around an event schedule that does not wait for anyone.

That is the case for redeployable CCTV at events in a sentence: permanent-grade coverage that arrives, plugs into a temporary operation and can be removed when the event is over, without permanent CCTV infrastructure being installed. For your event clients, it is a way to add temporary CCTV coverage without committing to a permanent system.

It also sits inside a bigger shift. Martyn's Law – the Terrorism (Protection of Premises) Act 2025 – is expected to come into force in spring 2027, with the Security Industry Authority as regulator. Its introduction has increased attention on preparedness at publicly accessible premises and events. For some larger premises and events, government guidance gives effective CCTV with an adequately staffed monitoring point as an example of a possible public-protection measure – one option among several, rather than a blanket requirement.

The kind of supplier you can put in front of a client

The Great Yorkshire Show was a new kind of site for CCTV Hire & Sales, and that was understood from the start. It is a different world from a construction compound. The value was in applying the same deployment standard to a different environment, learning from the job and improving it for next time. That is what installers need from a supplier: someone who turns up and solves the problem in front of them, rather than disappearing the moment the order is signed.

That is the same thing installers value when they hire the REG Army for their own clients. You deal with Phil and Alex directly. If something needs sorting, you speak to someone who can sort it, not a ticket queue. And the deployment standard your client sees on the ground is the deployment standard your reputation gets judged on.

After a search, I was looking at several websites. Normally you send your details off and wait for a quote. Here it said if you're hiring a camera, it's this much. I needed the information there and then, and the website got to the point and told me what it was – what it costs, how it works, who you're dealing with. There's even a photo of the man you'll be speaking to, which is a nice touch.

There was something about it that made me think, I want to chase this one. When I followed up, Phil was the one I remembered – and the only one I rang. And he answered. If there's one way of measuring success – it worked.

I dealt with Phil the whole way through. It's a slightly different industry for him, and we both learned from it. You get a feel for the person you're working with. If there was an issue, I knew I could speak to someone who'd actually try to sort it, rather than being passed round a team as just another number. He's genuinely interested in solving the problem, not just selling you a box.

It gave us coverage on the ground we hadn't had before, and we're already looking at how to make it even better next year.

– Jamie Newson-Smith, Health & Safety Officer, Yorkshire Agricultural Society

Covering an event this year? Let's talk about it

If you have an event on your books – a show, a festival, a public gathering – and you need permanent-grade CCTV that deploys fast, holds up in front of a crowd and leaves nothing behind, the REG Army is built for exactly that. We cover events across Yorkshire and the wider UK, from our base in Rotherham. If you cover the wider region, our CCTV tower hire in Leeds gives you a sense of the standard and the deployment range.

Call CCTV Hire & Sales on 0114 321 1785 and tell us about the event. We'll tell you what we can do, and when.