Spanning the Distance for Reading & Leeds Festivals

SSL have been covering the live events, hospitality and construction industries, since 1978. From Circus Big Tops and permanent racecourse parade ring canopies to festival structures and the largest designed and fabricated portable long span tent ever made (Tensile 1) for which SSL are Guiness World Record holders.

SSL provides specialist services to other engineers and architects who do not normally use structural membranes in their projects. Alternatively, SSL can provide a complete turn-key solution for clients from design, detailing and prototyping to providing engineering analysis and membrane manufacturing drawings.

Clients include Disney, Live Nation, BBC, MTV, Alton Towers, Glastonbury Festival, Burberry, Warner Bros, Festival Republic and BMW to name but a few.

Some of SSL’s most recent large-scale projects have been both Chevron Stages at Reading and Leeds Festivals in 2024 and 2025 working for Festival Republic. Both stages were transformed by the addition of “floating LED meshes” dubbed the LightCloud ®. These immersive barrel-vaulted LED webs of pixels which were tensioned over audiences of up to 50,000 people were suspended by a series of bespoke steel tensile catenary cables rigged to vertical steel perimeter truss masts.

With a total span of 60m and 10x supporting truss masts at 25m in height, these structures were designed to create unique festival focal points. Audiences underneath each LightCloud ® were dazzled and immersed with stunning visual content programmed to be an extension of the video, laser and lighting spectacles around each act on the stages.

For 2025 at Reading Festival the Lightcloud was installed within a large span mast supported tensile fabric structure 124m long and 66m wide.  The “floating LED mesh” was tensioned across an internally suspended trussing system.