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Pride Leeds

Leeds Organic Balloon Wall
Balloon Race Updates
  • Selfies
  • Light up the balloons
  • Side view
  • View from 8th Floor
  • Pride Organic Balloon Wall
  • Original Sketch

Here’s the Leeds Pride Organic Balloon wall built for the Trinity car park.

The original request was to build a cascade of balloons down the outside 5 floors of the car park and it needed to last 5 days. We know from previous experience that balloons left outside 24/7 do not last well.

I explained to Trinity that if we did build this it would only look good for 1 day. It’s possible it may look great at 8am the next day but in the summer heat the balloons could start disapearing fast.

So…. as the Pride event main days are Saturday & Sunday I was asked to build it twice, Friday night & Saturday night so it would look good all weekend.

The final effect was spectacular and people were taking photos & selfies all weekend. It looked great from the side view and attracted people from the station and shopping mall:

Side view

Here’s my original sketch:

Original Sketch

More Selfies:

Selfies

Leeds Trinity employed a lighting company to light the structure at night (most of the Pride celebrations are in the evening):

Light up the balloons

 

While we were in Leeds we were also asked to make a couple of costumes for Puregym for the Pride Parade:

Pride Costumes

As usual special thanks to Dave Crossley & Colin Gledhill for helping me with this. The 3 of us built this twice starting at 10pm and finishing at 4am. The structure had over 3000 balloons (1800 x 11″, 1200 x 16″ & 45 x 36″) and to inflate, build and rig this in 6 hours was legendary. We had to be finished for 6am so we were still 2 hours early on both mornings.

Having 2 experinced guys help on a job like this makes all the difference. You don’t build outdoor structures like this with fishing line and elastic bands, you need strong materials and you need to accept that no matter how good your method statement you may need to change direction on the night.

Originally we wanted to build the wall on the 8th floor, connect it all together, move it to the roof and lower it down the side of the building. As we were inflating on the 8th floor (the floor below the roof) the wind began to pick up. We (Colin) became concerned that the whole thing would be too big to handle so we had to change direction. We dropped lines down the outside of the building from the 8th floor to the 2nd  and lowered each garland into place 1 at a time.

Here’s some pictures of the fun on the 8th floor:

View from 8th Floor

Balloon Crew

Again my thanks to Colin & Dave. I couldn’t believe they both wanted a beer back at the hotel at 4.30am….. on both mornings (that small plastic bag on the floor is Colins overnight bag).

See also Pride Float &  27 Pride balloon walls

“All went really well for us and a big thank you! The balloons looked really good and was a great addition for us for Pride. You and the team were great and the install consistently look fab!”
Pride Leeds