It’s been a week since we finished E4, and with it, a full year at Steeplechase.
We’ve had pollen clouds, baking heat, high winds, dust, and a few showers of rain. We’ve had traffic jams, and caterer changes, and visitors both subtle and not.
What are your thoughts on the site? In retrospect, in hopes looking forwards, in moments of ease/convenience/annoyance?
What of the site access? The roads around it? The facilities as they stand?
Time for a 1 year check-up. How’s it doing?
For me, I’ve a couple of thoughts;
Facilities are sufficient. The loos are running well (thank you Redcaps), and the standpipes always seem too far away, but that’s normal. I don’t use the showers, but I know some folk want a permanent shower block.
Mud: What mud? We’ve gone from clay to almost sand, and the drainage is now amazing. Rains in the morning, all gone by the afternoon.
Dust. We seem to have swapped the mud for dust. There’s been a lot of it blowing around this summer. PD aren’t to blame for a dry summer. Ditto the pollen: I’m fairly sure the sudden groundsel explosion was leftover from previous resident. We’ll stamp it down.
(I live just down the road, so travel for me is stupidly short) The roads to get there are harsher than Dadford, as we’re on small village/country roads instead of the access ways to a major sporting venue 
Take it slow and steady folks…
I still miss the trees of the Navarri/Orc camp, and fighting in the woods. Ah well…
Not been but I hope to be involved in the development with my Joinery, General Construction, Drainage, Security & Envionmental works and I believe they are planning tree which unfortunately will take time but I believe it will work nicely
There was a hit to the general camp vibe initially, but it felt like the camp planners have got their heads around things as the year went on.
I missed E1, but E2 had lots of generic white bell tents visible big gaps in places between interesting tents and stalls which made the site feel a little soulless. That improved a lot over E3 and E4. Not quite as many town squares as the old site, but there’s a good busy high street feel to most of the camps now.
For me, the main differences are:
Distance. Two of us used to pitch our tents on Thursday and drive home again (to Oxford). Then on Friday the others would arrive during the day with a van and I’d get there at 5pm with the children. Now, we pack the van on Thursday, the others have to pitch the tents on Friday. I arrive around 6:30pm and often the set-up is incomplete (in one case due to wind breaking guy ropes and in another due to a later departure). After the fiasco of E1, leaving the site has been fine. We’ve tended to pack the van and then walk to long stay to our car to avoid bringing it on, but the van hasn’t had big issues getting off. I’d prefer it if you could drive straight onto long stay rather than having to drive to GOD and then back out again. Luckily the children are old enough to be dropped off while I park the car. I used to do the same at Dadford, but in that case I was dropping off almost in sight of out tents.
Ground. I’ve had to buy metal rebar tent pegs after E3, where the ground was so hard I couldn’t use my wooden ones. On the flip side, the site didn’t get churned up at E4 with driving on wet ground.
Layout. We’re now camped next to Anvil Centre (next to the Academy at E2 and Senate at E3/E4). In principle this is great, and a much better position than next to the edge of the IC field, but the League is so long that I no longer walk up and down the main street.
Facilities…we’re still quite close to water and toilets (but only the tardis type). In another nation someone had strung powered (but dim) lights over the toilets so you could see during the night.
Overall – generally the experience is now on par with Dadford, apart from trees and distance, with the bonuses of an expectation of future improvements and a sense of belonging.
It’s nice that Urizen’s camp finally has space to have, well, space. We had become a dense little warren of a camp at Dadford and Steeplechase means we finally have a central space to muster and play "dodge the children playing at IC soldiers
The main frustration is the lack of proper line between IC and OC spaces…and the tangential Enterprise van of all combat field shots, alongside folks using Access North camping as a spot to watch conjunctions.
In a weird thing, both good and bad: The move to the new site, with better cell signal than Dadford, has meant that I’m noticing more folks on phone (and visibly doing photo/filming, not for access requirements) during time in…which is horrendously jarring in a number of uncomfortable manners.
The logistics aspects seem fine to me and clearly a huge amount of work has gone into that.
Unfortunately for me the magic of Anvil has been lost at the new site. I can’t quite put my finger on why, but perhaps it’s because everywhere looks the same now. At the old site I’d walk through a nation’s camp and see all those little things that made it clear which nation it was. At the new site all I can see are identical bell tents.
And of course as a Navarri I miss the magic of our old woodland camp.
I understand the need for the new site and I really appreciate the effort. I just… don’t enjoy coming to the new site very much.
I’m “lucky” in that the site move didn’t really affect my journey much - what’s a little 15 minutes (the time difference when travelling down from mine) between friends when you’re travelling over 5 hours after all? Assuming the A1 doesn’t play silly buggers like it did for our journey home after E4…
As for the site itself, I do like how much flatter it is, but I’m still struggling a bit with the size. At Dadford we’d occasionally wander around just to see what’s in the different nations, but that’s much harder to do at this one. There’s some nations I haven’t seen at all, and others I’ve only stopped into because someone has organised a meeting there! In part that’s on me, I just need to find reasons (and the energy) to visit some of the others.
Facilities are sufficient for me as well. Could they be better? Of course, but that will likely always be the case. As Kardrath says, camp planners have been wrapping their heads around the changes and much improving the layouts. I do agree that a bit more delineation between IC/OC and the nation camps themselves would be good, but I think that will likely come with time. I would love to see a few more standing lights around the field though, especially not far from toilets and standpipes!
As with all things, if you have major concerns or things you want to share, especially as we’ve now had a year in site, you can send them to feedback@profounddecisions.co.uk 
Lets start with the big one for me , distance. I now have an aprox 7hr drive to site so thats a definite downside. It makes set up on Thursday later, and im really tired so generally stay in camp Thursday night rather than going round to see friends in other nations.
Toilets/ showers: good, we are fortunate not to camp to far from both
Dust: one of our group ended up in a&e due to the dust and pollen, i know pd can’t control this, but a water bowser going over the battle field just before battle may have helped, something to think about.
Site size: its huge! The potential is amazing for this site but I now find i can only reach a couple of nations per day due to my mobility. Not really a big issue to be fair.
Security: I am aware there was a major theft at e4 when someone’s horse box was stolen, i know some of the security crew and they do an amazing job but I think this site is so big it needs to either expand hugely or get a professional team in, in the same way as we do with 1st aid.
Over view: The site is great and the advantages out way down sides for sure. We expected teething problems for the first year, and im sure next year is going to be amazing!
Many pros, a few things that are neither good nor bad, and a smaller number of significant drawbacks but hopefully ones that can be mitigated.
Drainage is so much better now; I’m so glad to see the back of the Mhorish swamp. The Regio being centrally located in the Hub alongside the other major facilities makes sense and is quite convenient; it’s a pity the Hall of Worlds can’t join it but I understand the logistical reasoning for where it is. The flat terrain makes the walk to the shuttle bus so much less arduous now, and the improved site access means the bus no longer seems to get stuck trying to merge into the traffic leaving the site.
Highguard being surrounded on two sides by hedges and a third by the edge of the site makes for quite a change after being the nation everyone passed through to reach the sentinel gate. It makes for a much quieter space that fits the cloistered feel of the nation and feels more like a camp than a thoroughfare. It does mean that as an already small nation it’s quite isolated, although I think being very close to the hub helps mitigate that at least.
Travel to the site isn’t as bad as I expected, coming from the west I expected worse when I realised I’d have to go through the London tube to get there. I found that the trains from Cambridge North are more frequent and more reliable than from Banbury, so overall the journey home is actually slightly easier.
I do miss how easy it was to navigate by eye at Dadford, the flat terrain at Steeplechase makes it hard to find a useful landmark; I often confuse the Hall of Worlds with the crew tent (especially in the dark) and then find I’ve wandered off-course on my way to Parlays/Conclave/Order meetings/etc. It’d be nice if nations had/were allowed to raise landmarks that can be seen over the tents to aid navigation.
The showering facilities are sadly quite a downgrade from Dadford, I really miss the permanent shower block there. The queues for the portable showers seem longer than we had to deal with at Dadford and the enclosed cubicles means they get very warm and humid from back-to-back usage; I’m often already sweating before I’ve had a chance to get dressed. I really hope that a permanent shower/toilet block is high on PD’s priority list, it would improve quality of life on site so much.
Overall, generally a step up but I really hope PD will be investing in wash facilities, that would make everything so much better.
So all these comments are based on having started at e1, and thus not having the old site to compare to.
I didn’t struggle with knowing where I was at all. At e1 and e2 I bought a map, but by e3 I knew where everything was well enough to not need it. I didn’t really struggle with the size of the site. Finding a ref, similarly, was rarely an issue: finding one who knew how to do the thing I wanted to do in the app sometimes was.
I never saw the old senate / forge / Sentinel Gate, although I understand they weren’t great for level access and eventually became too small.
There are definite advantages to empire being in a big city, hotels and taxis being one. Another is ease of public transit. The risk of crime is a drawback, but some of that might just be scaling challenges.
Toilets not having sinks is a big drawback; at other festivals they do (even portaloos) but I understand at empire they’d run dry over a weekend.
Things I did struggle with: