Your Fair Floor Plan: Laying Out Booths And Aisles

The plaza manager's email says "please send your layout plan by Friday". You have 45 sellers in a WhatsApp group, a phone photo of the plaza, and a rough idea that the tents go somewhere in the middle. Nobody has measured anything yet.

That's normal. Most first floor plans start as a sketch on the back of a flyer.

Your fair floor plan is the drawing everything else hangs on. Vendors book from it, the venue approves it, and your volunteers put up tents by it. Get the widths and the fixed obstacles right first, and the rest is arranging.

Below are the real Singapore numbers for booths and aisles, then flow, food and power, the spots vendors fight over, and how to draw and share the plan. We'll follow one invented example: a 45-stall weekend flea market under pop-up tents in an open-air plaza. Where the floor plan sits in the wider planning order is in how to run a market or fair.

What Goes On A Fair Floor Plan?

A fair floor plan is a scaled drawing of the venue showing every stall, aisle, entrance, exit and fixed obstacle, with each stall numbered. It does three jobs. Vendors book from it. The venue and the agencies approve it: SFA wants a layout plan with food stalls marked for your Temporary Fair Permit, and SCDF wants one where its permit applies, both covered in the Temporary Fair Permit guide. And your volunteers set up from it at 7am.

Draw it to scale. A plan that "looks about right" is how a row ends up 2m too long.

What Should You Mark Before You Place A Single Stall?

Mark everything you can't move before you draw a single stall, because stalls fit around the venue, never the other way round. Walk the site with a 30m tape and note:

1. Entrances and exits, including the path people actually take from the MRT.
2. Fire hydrants, pit covers, breeching inlets and nearby fire exit stairs. Outdoors, SCDF wants nothing within 1.5m of them.
3. Fire engine access roads and hardstandings, the marked bays where engines park. These stay clear all day: no tents, no vendor cars.
4. Building walls, awnings and shelters. Outdoor tents sit at least 3m away.
5. Trees, planters, lamp posts, steps and slopes.
6. Drains and low spots where rain collects.
7. Power points, the water tap, toilets and bins.
8. The load-in route: where vans stop and how far vendors carry stock.

Items 2 to 4 come from SCDF's conditions for outdoor events under its Temporary Change of Use Permit. SCDF's outdoor event fire safety conditions

Honestly, that site walk is the most useful hour in the whole plan.

How Wide Should Booths And Aisles Be?

Size each stall to the tent or table vendors actually use, and keep at least 1.2m between rows where SCDF's permit applies, more wherever people stop to browse. Most pop-up canopies you can rent or buy are 3m x 3m, which fits one 1.8m table plus a rack or a chair.

Five 3m tents in a row is exactly 15m, and two rows back to back are exactly 6m, so a block of 10 stalls is the biggest you can draw before you need another aisle.

Why 1.2m Isn't Enough For Browsing

1.2m is a minimum, not a comfortable aisle. At a flea market, two shoppers stopped on opposite sides fill most of it.

Accessibility points the same way. BCA's Code on Accessibility is written for buildings, not fairs, but MHA notes it sets 1.5m or 1.8m for primary accessible routes, and that 1.5m lets a wheelchair user and another person pass. MHA on the widths in BCA's Code on Accessibility 2025

We'd treat 1.5m as the floor for any public aisle and 3m for the main ones, with one step-free route through the market and no loose cable across it. Card fairs need wider aisles and better light still; see the guide to running a trading card fair.

How Should Visitors Move Through The Fair?

Visitors should come in where they naturally arrive, pass every stall on one easy loop, and leave by an open edge, with no pinch points. Five rules we'd follow:

• Put the entrance where the foot traffic is, usually the MRT side.
• Keep the mouth clear. An info table and a printed map just inside, and the first 5m left open.
• Keep your busiest stall away from the entrance. Halfway in, its queue pulls people deeper instead of blocking the way in.
• Anchor the far end with food, drinks or somewhere to sit.
• Avoid dead ends. Every aisle should open onto another aisle or an open edge at both ends.

SCDF's outdoor conditions also keep every spot within a 45m walk of an exit, and exits must open straight into the open air.

The best layout is one a first-time visitor can walk without a map.

Where Should Food, Power And The Generator Go?

Food stalls go together near the water tap and bins, away from clothes and books, and power goes where the sockets or generator can reach without cables crossing an aisle.

SFA's layout plan wants them marked anyway. Keep it away from vintage clothing and old books, which pick up cooking smells. Outdoors, SCDF's conditions ban open-flame activities such as blow torches, so ask each food vendor what they'll cook with.

For power, ask the venue where the sockets are and what load they take, and never promise more sockets than exist.

A generator outdoors sits at least 3m from tents and building walls, with two Class AB extinguishers and a spill kit nearby. Draw that clearance first. It takes more room than people expect.

Corners, Ends And The Spots Vendors Want

The spots vendors want are corners with two open sides, stalls facing the entrance, and stalls next to food, so mark them clearly. In a block of 10 back-to-back stalls, the four end stalls are corners, so four blocks give you 16 without trying. Keep two vendors selling the same thing out of side-by-side or facing stalls.

Mark the weaker spots too, like the stalls by the generator or the toilets. A vendor who finds out on the day doesn't book again.

Whether premium spots cost more is covered in how to price booths at your fair or market. The plan's only job is to make them easy to see.

Walkthrough: A 45-Stall Flea Market Under Tents In An Open-Air Plaza

Here's how we'd lay out our invented flea market: 45 stalls of 3m x 3m tents on a paved plaza about 45m x 30m. A mall wall runs along the north side, a road along the south, and the MRT exit is to the west. A hydrant sits by the south kerb, and the only water tap is at the east end.

1. Setbacks first. No tents within 3m of the mall wall or 1.5m of the hydrant, and the road's fire engine access left clear.
2. Four blocks of 10. Forty general stalls, each block two rows of five back to back: 15m x 6m, right at SCDF's limits. Blocks sit two by two with 3m aisles all round, so every stall faces an aisle.
3. Food at the east end. Five stalls in one 15m row by the tap, so visitors from the MRT walk the whole market.
4. Entrance on the west, with an info table and the first stalls 5m back from the edge.
5. Generator in the south-east corner, at least 3m from every tent, fenced off. Cables run along each block's spine, covered wherever one crosses an aisle.
6. Extinguishers no more than 15m apart along the tent rows.
7. Number everything. A01 to D10 for the blocks, F01 to F05 for food, with the 16 corners marked.

Tents and aisles fill about 44m x 21m, leaving a 9m strip by the mall wall for benches and bins.

How Should You Draw The Plan?

Use whichever tool you'll actually keep up to date: grid paper, the venue's own PDF, or a floor plan tool.

• Grid paper. One square per metre. Free, quick, and messy once vendors swap.
• The venue's PDF. Ask for the site plan with dimensions, check its scale against one distance you measured, then draw over it in Google Slides, PowerPoint or a free tool like draw.io.
• A booth map tool. On BookASquare you upload the venue's plan as a background, trace and label stalls with snapping guides, export a PDF for the venue, and let vendors book from the same map. It won't check SCDF's distances for you, so the tape measure still decides.

If you assign every stall yourself, you don't need a booking tool. A clean PDF does the job.

Sharing The Plan With Vendors And The Venue

Share one version of the plan, numbered the same way everywhere, and lock the tent layout before it goes to SCDF. Its outdoor conditions say tents go up as per the layout you submitted, so moving a block later isn't a small change.

• Vendors need their stall number, stall size, what's provided, and load-in time and route.
• The venue needs dimensions, setbacks, exits, the generator spot and the food stalls.
• Visitors need a simple map at the entrance and on Instagram.

When the group chat map, the venue's PDF and the numbers taped to the tents all match, setup morning goes quietly.

What To Do Next

This week, walk the site with a tape measure and mark the fixed list. Then draw your blocks, check them against the table, number every stall, and send the draft to the venue before vendors pick.

If you'd like vendors to choose their own stall from the plan, see how the booth map works for organizers.