The Dewars Centre stands on Glover Street in Perth, Scotland, postcode PH2 0TH, and is run by Live Active Leisure. It is primarily a sports venue with curling rinks and an ice rink, but its Strathmore ice hall is available to hire for large scale events, conferences and exhibitions from April to August, that is outside the ice season. The venue also lists a meeting room for up to sixty people.
Four months of the year
The most important fact about this venue is not a dimension but a calendar. The venue states that the Strathmore Hall is available to hire during the months of April to August each year, for large scale events, conferences and exhibitions. Outside that span the floor works as an ice rink and curling sheets.
Two consequences follow. First, if a client asks about an event in Perth in autumn or winter, it is almost certainly not the Dewars Centre, and that is worth checking before the run reaches the schedule. Second, four months of availability across a whole year means dates inside that window are tight and a week slip is often impossible. We set out how to count the schedule backwards in the article on the build-up and breakdown calendar, and the consequences of being late in the piece on dispatch deadlines and late delivery.
An underground car park is no place for a trailer
The venue describes its parking unambiguously: an onsite underground car park with around three hundred spaces and wheelchair lift access. It publishes no entry height, no information about access for heavy vehicles, and nothing about a dock or ramp at the Strathmore Hall.
For a carrier that is a warning sign, not a gap to be filled with a guess. An underground car park has a height restriction by definition, usually under two and a half metres, so it is a space for cars and at most light vans. Where a vehicle carrying a display then stands, and how the load reaches the hall, the venue does not publish. The answer has to come from the management before departure, because it decides not only the vehicle type but whether a heavy exhibit can be delivered at all. We cover this more broadly in the article on venue access limits.
The approach: the A93 and the city centre
The venue describes its approach purely by trunk roads: from the A93 and Tay Street you head into Perth city centre, continue onto Glasgow Road, which is also the A93, and turn from it into Glover Street. The venue sits next to the Perth Leisure Pool and about ten minutes walk from the bus and railway stations.
It publishes no motorway junction. What is worth knowing is that Perth sits where two Scottish road axes meet: the route from the south, from Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the route north towards Inverness. A load heading further north passes through this area anyway, as it does on a delivery to Eden Court in Inverness. The character of the whole run from Poland is set out in the article on trade fairs in Scotland.
Perth has no low emission zone
Scotland operates four low emission zones, in the city centres of Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow. Perth is not among them, so an approach to the Dewars Centre carries no emission standard requirement and no charge. A route from the south can still cross the Edinburgh or Glasgow zone depending on its path, and that is checked separately. For the venue itself the constraint is not a zone but the geometry of city-centre streets.
What to settle before arrival
- Whether the event date falls inside the April to August window in which the hall is hired out.
- Where the delivery vehicle stands, given that the venue car park is underground.
- How the load reaches the Strathmore Hall and what dimensional limits that route imposes.
- Whether unloading equipment is available on site or has to be ordered.
- What floor protection applies in a hall used outside the ice season.
- The allocated unloading window and how passes are collected.
The floor protection question is not a formality. A hall that works as an ice rink for most of the year has a refrigeration installation underneath, so how a heavy stand may be set down is often governed separately by the management.
What we do at our end
We collect stands and exhibits in Poland, and from exhibitors in Czechia, Slovakia, Austria and Hungary we gather the load through our hub. At the Kielce base, about 4 km from the fairground and open around the clock, we assemble a stand into one consignment before departure. A groupage vehicle waits for the next scheduled line departure. Clearances run in cooperation with the customs agencies we work with regularly on both sides. For Scottish addresses the load usually passes through a cross-dock at our warehouse in Milton Keynes, which gives two transhipments across the route and lets the final leg run on a vehicle matched to the street rather than to an international run. We commit to an hour at the gate rather than an hour of unloading.
Groupage or a dedicated vehicle
At this venue the arithmetic tilts towards groupage and a smaller vehicle, not because of the load size but because of access. Until it is clear where the vehicle stands and how the load gets in, an articulated rig is a risk rather than a saving. The general rule of about twelve pallets, roughly a third of a trailer, applies at venues with a marshalling yard. More in the article on choosing between FTL and groupage.
Sources
- Live Active Leisure: Dewars Centre, Strathmore Hall hire and parking
- Live Active Leisure: plans for the Perth leisure venues
- mygov.scot: the four Scottish low emission zones
Planning an exhibition in Perth? Send the date, the room name and the item list through the quotation form and we will check vehicle access and match the transport. See also the exhibition logistics page.
