Be part of the 2025 Great Exhibition Road Festival!
The 2024 Festival saw over 50,000 visitors enjoying a diverse programme of awe-inspiring creative workshops, music and other artistic performances, innovative hands-on demonstrations, and live experiments. The Festival will return next year 7-8 June 2025, offering another weekend of events between 12-6pm each day.
Programmes like the Festival are key to our vision to empower society through STEM. Working alongside partners and local communities, the Festival gives you the chance to bring your work to new audiences and connects us with the public to tackle shared challenges.
Anyone at Imperial can be involved in the Festival, even if you're new to public engagement, and we are looking for inspiring ideas for exciting activities from our community to share and celebrate our work with a wide range of audiences. Fully formed ideas are great but so are more general declarations of interest.
Want to know more? Read our detailed guidance below for more information on the type of content we are looking for, the support available to you before and during the Festival, and the audiences that we want to attract and the experience we want to give them.
Please make sure you read the Great Exhibition Road Festival proposals guidance before filling in the proposal form. By submitting your proposal, you confirm that you have read through this guidance document, and are agreeing to the deadlines, roles and responsibilities outlined in it.
Read the 2025 Great Exhibition Road Festival proposals guidance
Submit your proposal to be part of the Festival
Preview the proposal form questions in advance of filling it in online
FAQs
- When do I need to submit my proposal by?
- Can I get advice before submitting a proposal?
- When will I find out the outcome of my proposal?
- What are the aims of the Festival?
- Who are the audiences we are making content for?
- What types of content can I propose for the Festival?
- Is there a theme we should be considering for the 2025 Festival?
The deadline for submissions is 11:59 pm on Sunday 3 November 2024.
After reading the guidance document, if you'd like to discuss your ideas further, please book onto our online Great Exhibition Road Festival advice session.
You'll hear all about the Festival from its organisers, learn about the proposals process, get feedback on your initial ideas and answers to any logistical questions you may have.
If your Festival proposal is successful, you will be contacted in January 2025. At this point we'll also give your point of contact within the Festival team and most likely a specific location across the Festival site where you will be based.
- 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!
The Festival programmes a wide range of content, and we're excited to hear your ideas for the types of activity you want to put on. The proposals from lists seven different types of experiences that we could offer visitors in 2025 (including talks, interactive exhibits, and performances) but there is also an ‘other’ option for ideas that don’t fit into these categories.
The guidance document outlines the seven existing options in full, detailing what we mean by them and the kinds of content we are looking for.
One of the new themes that we will be exploring through the Great Exhibition Road Festival's 2025 events programme will be senses, but this does not have to strictly inform your proposal. For all of the events at the Festival, we would strongly encourage that you consider how you can communicate your research through the different senses (sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell) to create multi-sensory experiences that turn Imperial research into memorable and engaging events for all of our visitors. This will help to ensure that the events remain as inclusive as possible for a diverse audience with varying access needs.
"With all the families having fun and feeling welcomed in the university space, as a scientist I rarely think about the impact science has in society. I could observe that this weekend." - Imperial researcher
"The presenters were just brilliant - enthusiastic, knowledgeable, friendly, and made every one of every age very welcome." - Festival attendee
"I am more comfortable with speaking to the public about the research we carry out and have become quite good at explaining it in simple terms. It also helped me re-discover how much I like science!” - Imperial researcher
Volunteer at the Great Exhibition Road Festival!
Gain experience, develop skills, build confidence, meet new people and have fun by volunteering at the Great Exhibition Road Festival!
As a volunteer, you will help with the smooth running of the event, from being on hand to answer visitor queries, to supporting stall holders and our exhibitors in their activities. Full training is provided and it is an invaluable opportunity to make new connections and truly be part of something great.
Volunteering for the 2025 Festival will open closer to the time.
Learn more about volunteering >
If you have any questions about volunteering at the Festival, you can email the team at pep.volunteering@imperial.ac.uk.