The Great Exhibition Road Festival

To create a unique Festival that connects some of the world’s most iconic institutions in an inspirational fusion of the arts and sciences.

To deliver a dynamic range of participatory visitor experiences that generate curiosity and a pioneering spirit among our audiences and institutions.

To engage 50,000+ people through events taking place on Exhibition Road and across partner institutions over the Festival weekend.

To engage communities and audiences who do not usually access our institutions through co-created projects that are part of the Festival weekend.

To celebrate diversity – the diversity of our communities, and that within art and science.

The Festival attracts a varied audience of all ages, with different levels of knowledge and interest in science. London families are a key audience, with parents wanting their children to feel inspired by our research, however 41% of 2024 crowds were adults attending with other adults, or by themselves. Many of the Festival’s cultural and museum partners will create family-friendly events for their contribution to the Festival, so we are keen to ensure that adult and young adult audiences are well catered for as well.

African and/or Caribbean audiences

Visitors that identify as belonging to this group are the lowest percentage that attend the Festival (significantly lower than the 14% from across London that identify as belonging to these communities). London is a diverse and culturally mixed society and we want the Festival audience to reflect this. There are also large communities of African and/or Caribbean communities in the three local boroughs most relevant to Imperial – see below for more detail on local audiences.

Local audiences

We have experienced low turnout of local audiences from the most underserved parts of the three boroughs that Imperial College London work hard to engage with: Hammersmith and Fulham, Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster. Many of these targeted local communities represent the wider London landscape (a diverse and culturally mixed society) so the Festival needs to cater to this audience. Imperial College London works with local audiences through many initiatives, so we want to continue to offer the Festival as part of our ongoing relationship with them.

Nuerodiverse audiences

Another audience that are not necessarily under-represented but require additional consideration in your Festival activity development are those people who identify as neurodiverse. Someone who is neurodivergent can be described as having a commonly co-occurring ‘condition’ related to processing or cognitive differences. These conditions could be: Dyslexia, Autism, ADHD, and more. Another widely used term is Specific Learning Difference (SpLD). 16% of Festival attendees in 2024 identified that they are neurodivergent (with 9% stating they weren’t sure and 6% preferring not to say).

To cater for neurodivergent children, we have established a popular relaxed early morning slot for families with neurodivergent children on the Sunday of the Festival weekend, which we want to continue in 2025. However, it is important all our participating teams across the Festival site take into account the needs of this community in the development of their Festival activity. A good place to start is Imperial’s own EDI pages on dyslexia and neurodivergence.

By submitting a Festival proposal, you are entering into an agreement that you will accept certain responsibilities associated with your proposed activity. If you are unable to commit to any of these areas of responsibility, then we cannot guarantee your involvement in next year’s Festival.

Be available to meet with your Festival point of contacts if requested

In the new year you will be assigned a Festival Zone Manager, i.e. a member of the central Festival organising team who will be your go-to contact from that point until the Festival weekend itself. You will be invited to a 1-hour kick off meeting with them where they will introduce themselves, tell you more about the Zone where your activity has been placed and cover the upcoming deadlines and support available. After that they will provide feedback on your proposal before collating the logistical and operational information on your activity (see below).

For most successful proposals, Zone Managers will still need to meet individual teams to discuss their ideas in more detail. This is not necessarily a criticism of your proposal, but often a reflection of the logistical considerations that come with some of the public spaces we use for the Festival which might affect what you hope to deliver and how you deliver it. Such conversations are essential to helping our Zone Managers provide each team with the best possible location within their Festival zone, as well as the right power, equipment and health and safety paperwork to ensure the best outcomes over the Festival weekend.

Organise practise session and run throughs

In the weeks leading up to the Festival your Zone Manager might get in touch to organise in-person run throughs. This is mostly relevant for those running creative workshops, giving headline talks or organising more complicated/higher-risk tabletop exhibits. If you have been asked to set one of these meetings up, it is because the Festival team believe it will be really beneficial to the successful delivery of your activity over the Festival weekend, so please make time to schedule a run through and invite as many of the team who will be working with you over the weekend to attend.

If you are giving a talk and are asked to find time for a run-through, we hope you would have written most of your talk by the time of the run-through, so the Festival talks manager can give some useful feedback on the structure and audience appropriateness of your presentation.

Stay in regular communication with your Festival contact

After these initial meetings or proposal feedback emails, please stay in contact with your Festival zone manager over the entire period leading up to the Festival weekend. This means replying to their request for paperwork updates, as well as proactively informing them if anything changes in the makeup of your team or what you can deliver over the Festival weekend.

Meet your deadlines in the Festival timeline

Below is a table covering key actions and dates for the 2025 Festival. When you meet your festival zone managers in January, we will provide a more detailed timeline with deadlines allocated to specific days. Please keep to these deadlines.

Plan your set up, pack down and the staffing of your activity

In the months leading up to the Festival, you will be allocated a slot to set up your activity ahead of the Festival opening to the public. Please make best use of this time. This should include testing all electronic and internet connected devices in situ. If there are likely to be any challenges transporting equipment over the Festival weekend, please raise these with your Festival Zone Manager in good time, bearing in mind most trolleys will already be allocated to other Festival set up jobs. The Festival operates under the agreement that our campus and Exhibition Road are back to normal operations by Sunday night, so please ensure pack down plans take this into account.

Take full responsibility for the health and safety of your event

As always, everyone delivering any type of activity across the Festival weekend will need to fill in a risk assessment form, which will be provided in the new year. This form will ask you to list actions you will take to minimise risks posed by your activity. It is your responsibility to not just fill in this form and get it signed off by a departmental or faculty level safety officer, but also to ensure any mitigating actions and policies are adhered to over the weekend.

Each year we evaluate the Festival and collect feedback from exhibitors, visitors, and volunteers to find out what they most valued. Based on this, and the Festival aims listed above, we have the following suggestions for teams wanting to take part in 2025. Whilst we are not expecting each proposal to include all the elements below, we recommend at least considering how you might incorporate each into what you are submitting.

We would also strongly recommend teams consult the variety of engagement toolkits and resources that have been developed by Imperial’s Public Engagement team. Some of the most relevant ones for different types of activities are linked to later on this guide.

Ideas linked to themed areas or zones

Once we have received all proposals, we will group them into themed Zones across the Festival site. The Festival Team have identified some themes in advance that we would like to have present at the 2025 Festival. Below is a list of those pre-agreed themes and some more information on what they entail. Please make it clear in your application if your activity fits into any of these themes. There is still plenty of room for ideas outside of these pre-agreed themes if your idea doesn’t fit.

The central Festival team will provide different types of support to teams depending on the nature of the activity. While there will always be exceptions to the rules listed below, this table gives a sense of what you can expect from the central Festival team for each type of Festival content listed above.