The Great Exhibition Road Festival

The Festival draws a diverse audience of all ages and science interests. While London-based families remain central, 2025 saw an even split between family groups and adult-only visitors. Cultural and museum partners offer lots of family-friendly events, but we also aim to engage teens, young adults, and solo adults.

African and/or Caribbean audiences

The proportion of visitors that identify as belonging to this group who attend the Festival is 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 Black African and/or Caribbean communities in the three boroughs most local to Imperial.

Local audiences

We have historically experienced a lower Festival turnout from the most under-served parts of the three boroughs that Imperial College London work hard to engage with: mainly those living in the northern wards of Hammersmith and Fulham, Kensington and Chelsea, and Westminster. 

People with disabilities

One visitor group that are not necessarily under-represented but require additional consideration in your Festival activity are people who identify as disabled. This also includes people who identify as neurodivergent – i.e. someone who processes information differently, such as those living with dyslexia, autism, ADHD, and more. To cater for neurodivergent families and other visitors with similar needs, we have established a popular, relaxed, early morning slot on the Sunday of the Festival weekend.

However, it is important that all our participating teams consider the needs of the neurodiverse community, and people with disabilities more generally in the accessibility of their Festival activity. A good place to start is Imperial’s own EDI pages on dyslexia and neurodivergence.

Whilst the Imperial Public and Community Engagement Team tries to allow the activity ideas proposed each year to steer much of the Festival programme, there are certain elements we have committed to already – either because they have proved popular in the past, or because we are keen to freshen up the Festival each year and challenge our community with new formats.

To make it easier for the organising team, the Festival proposal form gives you an opportunity to tell us which, if any, of these pre-agreed parts of the Festival programme you would be happy to be part of. To help you answer that question, below is a bit more detail on the plans for these zones/areas of the Festival.

By submitting a Festival proposal, you are entering into an agreement that you will accept certain responsibilities associated with your proposed activity.

Good communication with your Festival point of contact

Each team is assigned a Festival Zone Manager as their go-to-contact from January to the Festival in June. At a 1-hour kick-off meeting, they will introduce themselves, give you information about the Zone you have been placed in and details on upcoming deadlines and support available. They will also later provide feedback on your proposal before collating the logistical and operational information on your activity in order to provide each team with the best possible location and equipment to ensure the best outcomes.

After any initial meetings or proposal feedback emails we ask that you:
1. stay in contact with your Festival Zone Manager over the 6 months leading up to the Festival
2. promptly reply to their requests for paperwork updates.
3. proactively inform them of any changes in the makeup of your team or what you can deliver over the Festival weekend

Organise a sufficiently large team to deliver your activity  

The Festival can be tiring so if you are proposing an exhibit stand or workshop, it is vital you can call upon sufficient human resources. For a single exhibit table, we would expect at least 3–4 members of your team to be engaging the public at any one time during the busiest periods of the Festival. Add in breaks for lunch and to see the Festival, we would expect a minimum of 6 volunteers across the Festival weekend.

Organise a practice 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. Please make time to attend and invite as many of the team who will be working with you over the weekend. If you are giving a talk, we hope you would have written most of your talk by the time of the run-through so your Zone Managers can provide useful feedback on the structure and audience appropriateness of your presentation.

Meet your deadlines in the Festival timeline

Below is a table covering key actions and dates for the 2026 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. 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. The Festival operates under the agreement that our campus and Exhibition Road are back to normal operations by Sunday night, so please ensure your 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 by your Zone Manager in the new year. 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 are adhered to over the weekend. If you expect your activity to be high-risk, please flag this with your Zone Manager as early as possible.

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 2026. 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 and Community Engagement team. Some of the most relevant ones for different types of activities are linked to in the final section of this guide.

Ideas linked to specific areas of the Festival site

Once we have received all proposals, we will group them into themed zones across the Festival site. This guide has identified above some specific locations and themed areas that will form part of the 2026 programme. Please make it clear in your application if your activity fits into any of these pre-agreed parts of the Festival programme. There is still plenty of room for ideas outside of these pre-agreed themes if your idea doesn’t fit.

Ideas that tell stories linked to the Great Exhibition of 1851 or the collective 175-year history of the area 

Whilst the 2026 Great Exhibition Road Festival is not a history festival, Imperial and the Festival partners will be marking the anniversary and celebrating our collective South Kensington history in various ways across the event. As a result, we would be very interested to hear if Imperial teams are able to make any links between the Festival activity you are proposing and the Great Exhibition of 1851 – perhaps in terms of a particular exhibit/exhibitor, or attendee that was present back in 1851, or by drawing the story of your research back to that Victorian period. We would hope each team might at least consider any historical narratives that could be brought out in their planned activities.

The Festival proposals form lists seven different types of experiences that we could offer visitors in 2026, as well as an ‘other’ option for ideas that don’t fit into these categories.

Talk or discussion

Festival talks give a predominantly adult audience (16+) a chance to hear about a particular subject in a bit more depth. They must be developed and delivered for non-experts with a publicly appealing title. As well as individual speakers, we are always interested in panel sessions that bring speakers from different backgrounds together to discuss a single topic. Discussion panels need to be diverse in as many ways as possible and can include external speakers – ideally from the Festival partnership or the local community. If you'd like to give a talk at the Festival, please read our guide on how to give an engaging talk.

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.