Modern marquees can be erected on any surface, they can even go over swimming pools with spectacular results. But marquees are essentially strong boxes and you need to anchor them down to make sure they don’t go anywhere.

Keep in mind that marquees are better at resisting strong winds with the sides on, taking the sides off effectively leaves you with a large umbrella which needs a lot more anchoring down.

On soft surfaces:

• Use tie downs with ratchet straps attaching to the eaves of the marquees pulling down to marquee stakes.
• If it is a sheltered location then just using the marquee stakes through/over footplates is usually sufficient

On hard standing:

• If there is soft ground nearby or other strong anchoring points (fence posts for eg) then use longer tie downs to these points
• If long tie downs aren’t possible then you must use heavy weights: concrete blocks, sand bags, a vehicle (if a marquee was only up for a few hours we’d use one of our vans) or water butts (assuming you have access to a hosepipe to fill them up on site)
• Strap the heavy weights to the marquee. Avoid setting them back and using tie downs as the weights might get dragged towards the marquee slackening the tie down and allowing the marquee to move.

If in doubt put more weights/tie downs on.

Thanks for reading

Spencer

This entry was posted on Monday, January 31st, 2011 at 12:18 pm and is filed under marquee hire advice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.