It goes without saying that the pandemic affected London’s, and of course the UK’s, event industry in ways none of us could have imagined. The phrase ‘unprecedented’ has been widely used over the past 18 months, but when you consider the sector – one of Britain’s biggest success stories worth £70 billion and employing 600,000 people – virtually ground to a halt overnight, it’s little wonder why it’s used so often.
Prior to the pandemic, ExCeL London, situated in the Royal Docks area of London, hosted some 400 events a year and welcomed four million people through its doors, but this all changed in March 2020.
Yet, despite this uncertainty, the events sector remained united throughout and its ability to overcome such challenges and diversify is equally remarkable.
For ExCeL, we are immensely proud of the role we played during lockdown, both for the health and wellbeing of our nation — supporting the NHS through its Nightingale Hospital and then the Covid Vaccination Centre — but also to showcase the versatility and determination of the events industry as a whole.
But now, thankfully, we’re in a position where we can be fully focused on looking to the future and reaffirming our position of being the home of world leading events and play a key part of London’s economy.
Central to this has been continued investment in the venue itself, which has given us the chance to further enhance our visitor offering. These include installing new state-of-the-art digital signage, significant upgrades in our IT infrastructure and a new food and beverage partnership with London’s leading street food vendor KERB to provide even more choice to visitors.
We are now seeing events levels returning to pre-pandemic levels. A‑near-capacity 56 events are scheduled until the end of 2021, whilst this year and next will see 11 new and relocated shows running for the first time at ExCeL, covering a variety of business-to-business and business-to-consumer offerings from The London International Horse Show, Shoptalk Europe and InfoSecurity.
More than 25 have already run and last month alone we safely welcomed more than 40,000 visitors for the Virgin London Marathon Show, in addition to strong attendance to Digital Transformation EXPO Europe, the Business Travel Show Europe, Global Offshore Wind and The Meetings Show – the latter officially opened by Tourism Minister Nigel Huddleston.
For sure we are seeing renewed confidence in the face-to-face events sector, indeed far faster than we expected, in an industry forecast to be worth £27.6 billion by 2026. This is thanks to the work of our organisers working closely with their respective communities to build trust and confidence that events can be safe and still be a very effective marketing channel.
Indeed, it’s very encouraging after these unprecedented times to reveal that events at ExCeL are flourishing, and renewed market confidence is growing steadily. Thanks to continued investment, we’ve also been able to secure significant new business wins to reinforce ExCeL and London, as the home of world leading events, delivered successfully and, above all, safely.