Growing Together: Our Event Stewarding Partnership with Longleat

Some of our favourite client relationships are the ones that grow year after year. Our partnership with Longleat began at the Festival of Light in 2023. Since then, we’ve returned for the 2024 and 2025 editions, while our work across Longleat’s wider programme of events has continued to grow. From our first winter on the estate to becoming a returning event staffing supplier, we feel incredibly lucky to play a part in an event that has become such a brilliant fixture in the South West calendar.

Our first Festival of Light was no small introduction.

Longleat asked us to recruit 70 event stewards in just three weeks, ready to support six weeks of the attraction.

Despite the estate’s rural Wiltshire location, 72% of our workforce was recruited from surrounding towns and villages. This allowed us to create valuable local winter employment while building a team with strong connections to the area.

Across 30 positions, our [event stewards] supported visitor movement, crowd management and the wider visitor experience throughout the estate.

It was the beginning of a partnership that has continued to develop ever since.

One of the things we love about returning to Longleat is seeing the estate completely transform each winter.

Our first year in 2023 saw the estate transformed for Treasured Tales, with spectacular lantern installations bringing much-loved stories and characters to life.

We returned in 2024 for Journey Through Time, taking visitors through millions of years of history, from prehistoric creatures and ancient civilisations through to the modern day.

Then, in 2025, British Icons put the spotlight on the people, places, traditions and cultural moments that have helped shape Britain.

Each theme creates an entirely different experience for visitors, but behind the scenes, the importance of experienced, approachable and knowledgeable event stewarding teams remains the same.

Being able to return year after year, watch these ideas come to life and contribute to an event of this scale is something our team is genuinely proud of.

Large-scale illuminations bring their own unique staffing requirements.

With thousands of visitors moving through outdoor attractions after dark, effective [event stewarding] plays an important role in maintaining visitor flows, supporting crowd management and helping guests navigate the experience.

Our work at Longleat forms part of our wider experience providing [Illuminations & Light Trails Staffing] for seasonal and outdoor attractions. This includes supporting events such as [Bristol Light Festival], where our teams have provided stewarding across Bristol city centre.

From heritage estates to city-centre installations, our focus remains the same: providing reliable people who understand their role in creating a safe and positive visitor experience.

Returning to the same site gives us something incredibly valuable: familiarity.

With every deployment, we learn more about Longleat’s site, operation and expectations. Returning staff bring their own knowledge of the estate, our management team understands the environment, and we can shape recruitment and deployment around what we have learned from previous years.

For us, that continuity is a huge part of what makes a long-term staffing partnership work.

We don’t want to simply arrive, supply people and disappear again. We want to understand how our clients operate, listen to feedback and build teams that feel like a genuine extension of the event.

Three Festivals of Light later, alongside a growing number of events across the Longleat Estate, we’re incredibly proud of how the partnership has developed.

We feel honoured to play our part in bringing such a brilliant South West event to life each winter — and we’re excited to see where the partnership takes us next.

Looking for an experienced staffing supplier for your next seasonal attraction? Explore our [Illuminations & Light Trails Staffing] and [Event Stewarding] services to find out how Ethical Staffing can support your event.