Any number of picture postcards, history lessons and even a map of the globe point to London having a strong case for sitting at the centre of the world.
Now, as host of the Olympics this year, the exhibition industry can confidently expect an enormous financial shot in the arm from the arrival of the greatest sports event on the planet.
London 2012, from 27 July to 12 August, will bring an estimated £500m (US$809) in additional business visits expenditure to the capital.
Ahead of the games, two of London’s most iconic venues will also benefit from the improvements in infrastructure.
With the construction of the cable car from the Greenwich peninsula to the Royal Docks underway, the O2 Arena will be effectively linked with Excel London, the capital’s biggest exhibition venue.
The cable car will cross the river at a height of 50 metres and could provide a crossing every 15 seconds, carrying up to 2,500 passengers per hour in each direction, equivalent to the capacity of 50 buses.
But will London’s exhibition venues receive additional legacy benefits courtesy of the capital’s time under the international spotlight? According to the latest rankings from the International Congress and Convention Association (ICCA) in 2010, calculated by the number of eligible meetings per city, London is 14th, behind Istanbul, Taipei and Buenos Aires, and top three cities Vienna, Barcelona and Berlin. Overall, London is on an upward trend, having risen five places since 2008, but it indicates there is a lot of work still to be done to bring those business travellers to the UK.
The future of the Earls Court venue has also cast some doubt over London’s exhibition capacity.The anticipated demolition of the west London venue, home to exhibitions for 75 years, has caused concern in the industry. Owner CapCo has proposed a 7,500 home development on the Earls Court site. And with both Hammersmith and Fulham, and Kensington and Chelsea councils both agreeing to supplementary planning guidance that supports the principles behind the development, it seems the future of the venue will be short-lived. CapCo hopes to lessen the impact of Earls Court’s loss by refurbishing its smaller west London venue, Olympia.
However, Excel London’s MD David Pegler dismissed fears that the profile of the UK capital will suffer from the potential closure of the historic Earls Court venue.
“We have been over-capacity in the UK for some time now,” he says. “The NEC in Birmingham has around 200,000sqm of space. Twenty-five years ago, it had around 90,000sqm of space, so it has doubled capacity in that time. We have not seen the industry grow at the same rate in that time.
“There has also been a big explosion of regional venues in places like Harrogate and Telford.”
Pegler believes few cities in the world have the same pulling power as the English capital. He references the financial benefits that the UEFA Champions League football final brought to London last year. The staging was so successful that the final will be held again at Wembley in 2013.
“In that week we held the Eular medical event, which had 16,000 delegates, and it was estimated the game brought £38m to the local economy, using the same comparison of hotel rooms,” he says.
However Pegler warns of complacency among London’s organisers and venues. “We rather lazily thought that people would just come anyway,” he continues. “London was held back because it didn’t have an international convention centre. That did hold us back a bit. But if you talk to hoteliers, those that come to London on business are likely to come back as leisure tourists at a later date. There’s no reason why London can’t be one of the world’s top five business destinations.”
Excel London has 100,000sqm of exhibition space and recently held the Ecobuild exhibition across three days, a brand that UBM was prepared to pay up to £50m for.
“Ecobuild champions the best of British exhibitions on an international platform,” says Pegler of the exhibition’s value.
The venue will be closed between June and September for the Olympic and Paralympic Games. It will host seven sports: wrestling, judo, fencing, table tennis, taekwondo, weightlifting and boxing.
“We want London to remain a destination where people come to debate and meet,” says Pegler.
“Everyone thinks that the UK is London-centric. But if people come into London then they are likely to go up to Scotland and play golf, or visit Wales.”
Michael Hirst, chairman of Business Visits and Events Partnership regularly makes submissions to the UK Government on improving London’s event space offering.
“I think Excel is still realising its full potential,” he says. “It takes time for a new centre to fill up.”
Hirst sees infrastructure as a key measure in improving London’s exhibition business. “The Government is still to decide on where it sees the future of Heathrow Airport, but improvements like Crossrail will make the transfer from west to east London so much easier.”
Tracy Halliwell, director of business tourism and major events at London and Partners, the capital’s official promotional organisation, believes the city has an “unrivalled variety of venue space” including Excel, Olympia, the Business Design Centre, Kings Place, the Barbican and the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre.
“London also has a vast number of more quirky event spaces which still offer large floor space but also add that extra ‘London twist’ to an exhibition – spaces such as The O2 arena, The Mermaid Conference and Events Centre or Alexandra Palace,” she says.
“There is also an abundance of hotels in London with many offering events space including Novotel London West, Hilton London Metropole and the Park Plaza Westminster Bridge.”
But it’s the country’s history in running events, that Halliwell believes will continue to draw exhibition business to London.
“The UK is the world leader in creating and running events globally with the events sector having so much maturity from 150 years of running and delivering events and exhibitions on every scale,” she says.
“Because we are a small island, we are driven by necessity to geoclone events around the world. This global positioning means that we create and extol best practice and innovation to the rest of the world. The UK’s organisers are arguably the most prolific international players, with events spanning the globe.”
Regeneration on a grand scale has taken place throughout London ahead of the Games. The city is currently undergoing more than £11bn of improvement projects such as the regeneration of London’s East End and the enhancement of its transport infrastructure. The city will also offer 100,000 hotel rooms for visitors to the event.
The residual effect of the Games will last beyond 2012 with major events already lined up on the London sporting calendar, such as the ITU World Championship Series Triathlon Grand Final and a brand new two-day fixture for London, Festival of Cycling – the first major event to be staged in the Olympic Park following the Olympic Games.
With planning, London can use this opportunity to regain its position as a leader for international events, and not get left on the starting blocks.
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London’s biggest rival
The NEC is the biggest exhibition space in the UK, with 186,000sqm located over a total of 247 hectares.
Situated just over 80 minutes away by train from the capital, the venue’s MD Kathryn James says the venue can compare and contrast with what London has to offer. The NEC includes UBM Live’s IFSEC security show among its top international events. It also hosts the Crufts international dog show and accompanying exhibition, which last year had 2.25 million visitors, of which 10 per cent were international.
James says she sees growing business for the venue coming from international franchises.
“We have seen a lot of UK organisers franchising out their shows. But we are looking to see how the reverse would work. For example the International Wine Fair is embedded in London. But there are other venues, for example the Fieras in Italy, who also do their own wine shows. We are investigating how we could bring that content across.”
James agrees with some of the remarks made on the potential loss of Earls Court to London’s exhibition industry, made by David Pegler.
“Pegler is right in some ways. We think UK exhibition venues are operating at 30 per cent capacity overall. We wouldn’t claim our research is scientific, but it’s based on what we regard as our competitors in the exhibition landscape.”
However James does feel that Earls Court may yet be keenly missed by the exhibition community.
“People still associate [events] with West London venues,” she says. “I think that cities take about 20 years to move gravitational centres. A lot of visitors still say ‘West is best’”.
Any comments? Email exhibitionworld@mashmedia.net
This was first published in the Issue 2 edition, 2012 of Exhibition World.
