Two venues, one city, two different briefs
Exhibitors talk about a London show as though London were a venue. It is not. ExCeL and Olympia are separated by about fifteen kilometres of city and by roughly a century of building technology, and the practical distance between them is larger than the map suggests. One is a logistics-first modern hall built around the idea that a lorry should be able to reverse up to your stand. The other is a Victorian exhibition palace that was designed to be looked at, and which is treated accordingly by the people who protect it.
Everything downstream follows from which of the two you are in: how tall you can build, whether anything can hang above you, how heavy the floor will take, how big a single component can be before it will not physically reach the stand position, and how long the build-up realistically takes. Confirm the hall first and the rest of the project has a foundation. Leave it vague and you are designing on an assumption that has a coin-flip chance of being wrong.
ExCeL: the column-free box and what it lets you build
ExCeL's halls run long and clear, at ground level, without columns interrupting the floor plate. For a stand designer that combination is close to a blank sheet. Sightlines are unobstructed, so a stand can be planned around how it reads from thirty metres away rather than around a pillar that happens to land in the middle of your space. The roof structure is engineered to carry suspended load, which puts hanging banners, overhead lighting rigs, suspended signage and full double-deck structures within reach of anyone whose budget and show regulations allow them.
The freedom is real, but it is not free. Rigging at ExCeL runs through the venue's appointed contractor, with its own order deadlines, its own drawings and its own sign-off, and those deadlines sit well ahead of the build-up. Suspended elements need structural calculations and a rigging plan submitted in advance. We build that submission into the project timeline rather than treating it as paperwork to be chased in the final fortnight, because a rigging order that misses its deadline turns an ambitious design into a flat one at the worst possible moment.
Olympia: designing inside a listed building
Olympia asks the opposite question. Instead of what can we hang, the question is what can stand up by itself. Significant parts of the site are protected, which in practice means the building's fabric is not available to you: no fixings into the structure, restricted or unavailable suspension from the roof depending on the hall, and a general expectation that your stand touches the floor and nothing else. Columns appear in some halls, level changes and balconies in others, and the clear height varies considerably between the main hall and the smaller spaces.
Designed for, rather than adapted to, this is a genuinely good venue. Ground-supported truss towers carry the lighting a rig would otherwise hold. Tall freestanding elements, properly weighted and calculated, deliver the vertical presence a hanging banner cannot. And the building itself does work no stand can buy: an open, low, well-lit stand under that ironwork and glazing photographs better than almost anything in a modern hall. The stands that suffer at Olympia are the ones that were drawn for somewhere else and then trimmed until they fitted.
Rigging: where the two venues diverge most
If there is one line that separates a London stand into two versions, it is whether anything can hang above it. At ExCeL, overhead rigging is a normal part of a mid-size or large stand, and the visual consequences are substantial: your name is legible from across the hall, your lighting comes from above rather than from within the stand, and the floor is freed up because signage is not eating into it. At Olympia, for the protected halls, you are working without that option and have to recover the same three benefits from the ground.
That recovery is a design problem with good solutions, not a compromise to apologise for. Height is carried by freestanding towers or a portal structure standing on its own base; lighting moves onto the stand's own verticals and into the ceiling planes of any enclosed areas; identification shifts to large, high-contrast graphic faces placed where the approach lines actually run. The change is not cosmetic — it affects the weight distribution, the base sizes and the amount of floor the structure occupies — which is exactly why it has to be a decision made at the start rather than an adjustment made when the rigging request is declined.
Floor loading, upper levels and where the weight can go
Weight is the constraint people forget until it stops them. ExCeL's exhibition floor is a ground-level slab built for vehicles, which means heavy joinery, stone or tiled flooring, a raised platform, a full bar, machinery on display and the columns of a double-deck structure are all things it will take without argument, subject to the point-load figures in the technical manual. It is one of the reasons machinery-heavy and vehicle-based shows work well there.
Olympia is more layered. Alongside its ground-level halls the site includes balcony and upper-level spaces, and those carry lower distributed-load limits than a ground slab. That has direct design consequences: heavy solid joinery gives way to lighter framed construction with applied faces, deep raised floors give way to shallow ones, exhibits with real mass may need their position agreed with the venue rather than simply placed, and a double-deck is unlikely to be viable in an upper-level space at all. We check the loading figure for the specific space before the design commits to anything with mass in it.
Load-in: a drive-in hall versus a west-London street
At ExCeL, the build-up is the modern version: a marshalling process, a time slot, roller-shutter doors, and a vehicle that gets close to the stand position. Large prefabricated assemblies travel well in that environment, so a stand can be built in bigger pieces in the workshop and put together quickly on site, which shortens the build-up and reduces the number of things that can go wrong under time pressure.
Olympia is city-centre logistics. Goods access is off a live west-London street, delivery windows are tighter, marshalling space is limited, and some halls are served by lifts rather than a level drive-in — which puts a hard ceiling on the size and weight of any single component. That constraint reaches all the way back into the design: an Olympia stand is drawn in modules sized to what can actually be carried to the position, and the build-up schedule allows for the fact that materials arrive in more, smaller movements. Getting this right is unglamorous and it is the difference between a calm build and a bad night.
Which stand type suits which hall
The venue does a lot to answer the modular-versus-custom question before budget enters the conversation. At Olympia, where components must stay within what a lift or a narrow access route will accept and nothing may touch the building, a modular stand system is often the stronger choice on its own merits: it breaks down into manageable pieces by design, it assembles without the building's help, and it can be dressed with custom joinery and full-height graphics until it reads as bespoke. The system carries the structure; the finishes carry the brand.
At ExCeL, where the hall welcomes big pieces and heavy loads, a fully custom build or a double-decker earns its place — the venue will let you exploit it, and in a hall that open you need the presence. Country pavilions, with their many small units under one identity, work in either venue but are planned very differently: at ExCeL as a rigged structure with overhead identification, at Olympia as a ground-supported layout that establishes its identity through repeated vertical elements and floor treatment. The right answer is a reading of the hall, the show and how often the stand will be used again, not a house preference.
The shows, and what their audiences expect
London's two venues attract different kinds of events, and the design brief shifts with the audience as much as with the architecture. The large international trade shows that fill ExCeL's halls — travel, education technology, defence and security, healthcare — bring buyers walking long aisles with a list, and the stand's first job is to be found and understood at distance. That means legibility over subtlety: a clear name, a clear proposition, and a structure that reads from the aisle rather than rewarding close inspection.
The events that suit Olympia tend to be different in character — publishing, design, interiors, consumer shows with a strong editorial flavour — and they bring an audience that browses rather than hunts, and that notices materials. On those floors a stand is judged closer up: the quality of a joint, the honesty of a surface, the lighting on a product. A stand that would win attention at ExCeL can read as loud at Olympia, and a stand that is beautifully detailed at Olympia can go unnoticed at ExCeL. We design for the room and the crowd it draws, which is a large part of why the same brief cannot produce the same stand twice.
Briefing a London stand: what to confirm first
A London brief that starts well contains five things: the venue and the specific hall, the stand number and its dimensions, whether the space is a corner, an end or an island, the show's own height regulation for your stand size, and whether suspension is permitted and being ordered. Those five answers determine the shape of everything that follows, and four of them are usually available from the organiser's exhibitor manual on the day you book. Asking for them early is not administrative fussiness; it is the difference between a first design that can be built and a first design that has to be redrawn.
We ask for eight to ten weeks for a custom London build, which allows the venue submissions and the rigging order, where there is one, to run ahead of fabrication rather than alongside it. One practical note, since exhibitors ask: bringing a stand into the UK from the continent involves customs formalities, and we handle that as part of the job. It is a line on our checklist, not a problem you need to solve — and it is the least interesting thing about building in London. The hall is what decides your stand.
