STEEL STREET / GEMFEST
A FULL FESTIVAL STREET SET, DESIGNED, BUILT AND INSTALLED BY SOSA STUDIOS.
STEEL STREET
PROJECT
GEMFEST / PULLUP RECORDINGS
CLIENT
LOCATION
SET DESIGN / FACADE BUILD / SCENIC FABRICATION / INSTALLATION
SCOPE
CHARLTON PARK ESTATE, WILTSHIRE
01 / The Narrative
GemFest asked us to create a street, not just a collection of venues.
The brief developed into a full festival environment built around three micro-venues, with supporting shopfronts, filler spaces, signage, props and scenic details connecting everything in between.
Rather than treating each building as a standalone set piece, we designed the street as one neighbourhood. Every façade needed its own personality while still feeling like it belonged to the same world, so the visual language carried across materials, graphics, aging, street furniture and the smaller throwaway details people would discover as they moved through the space.
02 / The Build
SOSA took the project from early concepts through design development, fabrication, scenic finishing and on-site installation.
The three headline venues were supported by a wider layer of street architecture and dressing: shopfronts, a newsstand, poster walls, signage and smaller filler spaces that gave the street its rhythm.
Each element had to work within the realities of a festival build — balancing scale and visual impact with temporary structures, access, programme and install time.
Layered textures, bespoke graphics and distressed finishes then pulled the individual pieces together, making newly constructed façades feel lived-in rather than freshly installed.
03 / The Details
The smaller moments were just as important as the buildings.
A weathered newsstand, shop windows, satirical posters, graffiti, hidden references and throwaway street details gave people reasons to stop, look closer and notice something new every time they moved through the area.
Those details are what shifted the project from a row of festival façades into something that felt like an actual place.
The result was a street designed to reward attention, not just scale.
