Farnham Food and Drink Festival runs this Sunday, 27 September, 10am to 4pm. Free entry, over 100 food and drink traders across four sites in the town centre, and the eighteenth year it has run. It also opens British Food Fortnight, which is part of why it pulls the crowd it does rather than being just another market day.

If you are visiting, that is the whole story. If you have a pitch, there is a bit more to it — and most of it comes down to a window of about two hours.

The middle of the day is not like the rest of it

A one-day festival does not trade evenly. A six-hour event does not give you six comparable hours: the first is setup and stragglers, the last is people drifting to the car park, and the takings stack up in the middle. On a 10am–4pm festival the early afternoon is where the queue forms, and it forms for everyone at once.

That is not a surprising claim, and we are not going to put a percentage on it — it varies by site, by weather and by what else is within fifty yards of you. But the shape holds, and the practical consequence is simple: whatever your fastest configuration is, it wants to be in place before the rush, not discovered during it.

What "fastest setup" actually means on the day

  • Cut the menu before you arrive, not at noon. A short menu served fast beats a long one served slowly at a one-day event. The items that are slow to assemble are the ones that build the queue behind them.
  • Prep to the rush, not to the day. Whatever you can part-build in the quiet first hour is time you are not spending at one o'clock.
  • Decide in advance what you drop. If the queue gets away from you, knowing beforehand which two items come off the board is faster than deciding it in the moment with six people watching.
  • Take payment away from the hatch. Anything that moves ordering and paying off the serving window — a card machine on a lanyard, a QR menu people order from where they are standing — takes a step out of the bottleneck. That is the whole reason we built queue management the way we did.

Four sites is the other variable

This year's festival is spread across Brightwells Yard, The Borough, East Street and the Bush Hotel Courtyard, after roadworks moved it from the footprint it has used for seventeen years. We wrote up what that change means in more detail in the piece on the relocation.

The bit that matters for Sunday: footfall on a multi-site layout does not divide by four. It clumps, free buses move people between sites through the day, and nobody has a previous year's experience of this particular layout to tell you which site gets the anchor crowd. Anyone who says confidently that one of the four sites is the good one is guessing, because this is the first year it has run this way.

So plan for the rush arriving late and fast rather than steadily. If it arrives steadily instead, you have lost nothing by being ready.

Afterwards

Farnham sits near the end of the season for a lot of vans. Whatever the day does, it is worth writing down while it is fresh — which hours actually carried the takings, what sold out, what you carried home. That is the record that makes next year's pitch decisions something other than a hunch, and it is the same reasoning behind our end-of-season checklist.

If you are trading Farnham on Sunday, good luck with it. If you are going as a visitor, go early and walk all four sites before you commit to a queue.