Facility Seasonal Closure Planning Checklist

Write down whether the facility is fully shut, partly available or simply not being booked, since each of those creates a different set of arrangements.

Groups behave according to what they believe the gate means, and a half-closed facility with no stated rule gets used anyway.

List the parts of the site that stay in use even when the main facility is closed, such as a path, a car standing area, a bin store or a store room.

The parts that remain open are the parts nobody plans for, and they still need lighting, clearing and somebody watching them.

Note everybody who still needs to get in during the closure, including contractors, groundstaff, neighbours with a right of way and anyone holding a key.

Access lists made at closure are far more accurate than lists remembered when somebody is standing at a locked gate.

Decide whether the closure is driven by weather, by daylight, by planned work or by the pattern of use, and write down which, since that governs what can move.

A closure fixed by planned work can shift; one fixed by ground conditions cannot, and mixing the two produces impossible arrangements.

Record who may bring the closure forward or extend it, and who they would tell first when they do.

Extensions are decided quickly and communicated badly, and the groups who hear last are the ones who arrive to a locked gate.

Ask the surface supplier and installer whether a period out of use itself needs anything doing, since some finishes are affected by simply standing unused.

Closure is often treated as an absence of activity when for some surfaces and equipment it is an event in its own right.

Whether a surface or finish needs anything before or during a period out of use is confirmed with its supplier and installer, not assumed from general practice.

List every group, club, class, hirer and individual who uses the facility, including the ones who only appear occasionally.

Occasional users are absent from the routines that carry news, so they are the ones who turn up during a closure.

Decide how each of them is told, and check that the route reaches people who never see a notice fixed to the fence.

Notices on site only inform people who are already visiting, which is the group least in need of being told.

Write down what happens to bookings that already sit across the closure, and who contacts the people holding them.

Existing bookings are held in one place and the closure is decided in another, and nobody notices the overlap until somebody arrives.

Note who answers enquiries during the closure and where questions go when that person is unavailable.

An unanswered enquiry during a closure usually becomes a visit to the site to find out what is happening.

Agree what the notice on site says, including who to contact about it, and decide now who takes it down at the end.

A closure notice left in place after reopening is one of the most effective ways of losing occasional users.

Record how neighbours are told if the closure changes anything they would notice, such as lighting, gates, deliveries or grounds work.

Neighbours notice change rather than absence, and a short note beforehand prevents a complaint about work they did not expect.

Whether anything about the closure needs to be notified to the local authority or a governing body is confirmed with them rather than assumed.

Walk the site and list everything removable, including nets, posts, flags, seating, bins, hoses, hoardings, signage and loose equipment.

The list is what tells you whether the store is big enough, and it is always longer than the store.

Ask each supplier whether their equipment should come down, stay standing or be protected in place during a period out of use.

Some equipment suffers more from being dismantled and stored badly than from being left where it is.

Whether equipment is removed, left standing or covered is confirmed with the supplier and installer for that specific item.

Note where removed items would be stored, whether that place stays dry and secure, and whether it is already full of something else.

Store space is quietly committed to something else long before the closure, and that is rediscovered only once the nets are already coming down.

Record how anything heavy or fixed comes off and who is needed to do it, before anybody assumes it is a task for one person with a ladder.

Dismantling injuries and dropped equipment happen during closures because the work is treated as tidying rather than as a job.

Handling and dismantling of heavy or fixed equipment is arranged with suitably qualified people rather than improvised by whoever is on site at the time.

Label parts as they come off, including fixings, and keep the labelling with the parts rather than in the memory of whoever removed them.

The person who took it down is rarely the person who puts it back, and unlabelled fixings are how a component becomes unusable.

Photograph how things looked while still in place, including how they were fixed, since reassembly is where the small detail is lost.

A photograph of an assembled fitting answers questions that no written note anticipates.

List the services running to the facility, including water, power, lighting controls, heating, irrigation and anything connected to a network.

Services are invisible until they fail, and a written list is the only thing that makes them part of the closure at all.

Ask a suitably qualified person what should happen to each service while nobody is on site, and record exactly what they tell you.

Every service has a different answer, and applying one instruction to all of them is how damage occurs.

Isolating, draining or leaving a service running is decided by suitably qualified people for this specific installation, never from a general list.

Note anything on site affected by cold, such as a pipe, a tank, a dispenser or a stored liquid, and ask what that means here.

Cold damage happens in the part of the closure when nobody is visiting, and it is discovered by the first person back.

Protecting services and stored materials from cold is arranged with suitably qualified people and the relevant product supplier.

Record where meters, stopcocks, isolators and controls are, photograph them, and note the meter readings at the point the facility closes.

Somebody attending at short notice needs to find the isolator, and a photograph is worth more than a description of a cupboard.

Write down which systems keep operating on their own while the site is shut, such as timed lighting, irrigation or a heating programme, and who would notice a fault.

Automatic systems run unnoticed through a closure and are the usual explanation for a surprise later on.

Decide who visits the site during the closure and what they are looking for, since an unfocused walk round produces nothing worth having.

Purposeless visits are quietly abandoned, and the closure then passes with nobody having looked at the site at all.

Agree what a visitor writes down, keeping it to what is visible, such as damage, a blocked channel, standing water, growth or something moved.

Recording what is visible rather than what it might mean keeps the visitor useful without asking them to decide anything.

What any observed damage or blockage means is judged by a qualified professional rather than by the person who noticed it.

Record how visitors report what they find and who receives it while the usual routines are suspended.

The person who normally receives reports is often the person least active during a closure.

Note who looks at the site after severe weather and how they are prompted, since during a closure nobody is expecting to attend.

Storm damage at a closed facility sits undiscovered because the people who would have noticed it are not visiting.

Write down what a visitor does about anything that looks unsafe, and make that a call to somebody rather than a decision taken on site.

Giving the visitor a number to ring removes the pressure to judge something they are not equipped to judge.

Whether anything is safe to leave, approach or use is a judgement for suitably qualified people and, where relevant, the relevant authority.

Note whether gates, doors and barriers stay locked through the closure and who holds keys, including anybody who might attend at short notice.

Key arrangements change at closure and change back at reopening, and both changes are usually undocumented.

List the tasks that are difficult or impossible while the facility is in use, and mark which of them fit into this closure.

Work needing an empty site accumulates all season and then has to be arranged in whatever gap exists.

Ask each contractor what they would need from the site in order to work during the closure, such as access, water, power, parking or somewhere to store materials.

Contractors assume the facility is operating normally, and a closed site often lacks the very things they were relying on.

Record which work depends on weather or ground conditions rather than on availability, and keep those separate on your list.

Weather-dependent work cannot be scheduled into a closure in the same way as work that only needs an empty site.

Note whether any work would leave part of the facility unavailable after the closure ends, and who needs to be told that early.

Work that overruns the closure is the version of this that damages trust with user groups.

Write down which tasks have to happen before others, such as anything that would disturb a surface that is treated later.

Order matters more than timing during a closure, and getting it wrong means paying for the same work twice.

The order in which surface and equipment work should happen is set by the contractors and suppliers involved rather than by site convenience.

Decide who coordinates contractors during the closure so that two of them do not arrive needing the same access at once.

With nobody normally on site, contractor clashes during a closure go unnoticed until both parties are standing in the gateway.

Write down what has to be back in place before the facility can be used again, and who confirms each item is actually done.

A reopening list written during the closure is calm; the same list written on the morning of reopening is not.

Ask which equipment needs looking at by a suitably qualified person before it is used again after standing unused.

Equipment that was sound at closure is not automatically sound at reopening, and asking is the only way to know who should look.

Whether equipment is fit to be used after a period out of use is established by suitably qualified people and the relevant governing body.

Note what needs to be looked at on the surface and its surroundings after the closure, and who you would ask to do that.

Surfaces change during closures through growth, silt and standing water rather than through use, and the change is easy to miss.

The condition of a surface after a period out of use is assessed by the specialist contractor rather than judged on appearance.

Record how user groups are told the facility is open again, including anybody who made other arrangements while it was shut.

Groups that found somewhere else to go do not return automatically, and they need telling more clearly than regulars do.

Photograph the site at reopening from the same positions used at closure, since the difference is what the closure actually produced.

The paired set of photographs is the most useful thing a closure leaves behind, and it takes almost no effort to create.

Write down what this closure taught you, including anything that needed more people, more storage or somebody you had not arranged.

Closure knowledge lives in one person unless it is written down, and that person is not always there for the next one.