The NEC, ExCeL,
and Their Secret Plan Bs.

I had intended to write about T3’s relationship with China this week — that is still coming. But something happened yesterday afternoon that persuaded me I had information which, I suppose, few other people in this industry actually know.

Our installation team were building a stand at ExCeL. They sat in a queue for more than three hours waiting for their pre-booked slot. Three hours. For something that was booked in advance.

It brought back a conversation I had, years ago, with an architect who was involved in the original design and build of ExCeL. And it reminded me of another conversation — from the early 1980s — with a man who had been General Manager of the NEC before and during its opening in 1976.

Both stories explain something that has frustrated every stand builder in this country for decades. And both stories, it turns out, have the same shape.

The NEC — Built to Become a Car Factory

During the early 1980s, I met the man who had been General Manager at the NEC before and around its opening in 1976. He told me a very intriguing story of how and why the NEC came into being.

There was a great deal of resistance in the Midlands to the launch of an extremely expensive exhibition centre. Many people on Birmingham City Council did not expect it to survive. The project was eventually approved — but there was a secret Plan B. If the NEC could not start to make money within two years, it was to be sold to British Leyland, the holding company for many of the original British car manufacturers, based in the Birmingham area.

There was also — and this is where it becomes extraordinary — a political desire for the NEC to fail. To that end, with at least half an eye on the eventual sale to British Leyland, the halls were designed with very limited parking for contractors. The reasoning was simple: deliveries to a trackside car manufacturing facility do not require anywhere near the space needed for the hundreds of vans, trucks and lorries involved in stand building.

This explains why it is so difficult to park close to the original NEC halls, and why the queuing process was developed for all the halls that followed. Compare that to the ease of contractor delivery to German exhibition halls during the same period. The contrast could not have been more stark.

Unfortunately for those councillors, the NEC was an immediate success. Their financial opportunities — and Plan B — disappeared almost at once.

ExCeL London — Built to Become a Shopping Centre

Yesterday’s experience brought back the second conversation.

The architect I spoke to explained that the London Docklands Development Organisation had also needed a Plan B. They were not confident of the success of an exhibition centre so far from central London — so far from what they considered the bright lights.

The alternate plan was to turn ExCeL into a large out-of-town shopping centre, serving the Docklands and East London. To that end, the contractor access and parking directly outside the back of the halls was deliberately reduced — to save money, to reduce the footprint, and to increase the gross rental area available to future retail tenants.

That narrow, constricted delivery access was designed to be just wide enough to allow large lorries to deliver goods to department stores, with other trucks able to pass alongside. It was never intended for the chaotic, time-pressured, heavy logistics of stand building.

ExCeL has, of course, been a success. Plan B was never needed. But the access roads it left behind remained — and we contractors have been paying the price, literally, ever since.

A Pattern Worth Noticing

There is something in both of these stories that I find genuinely interesting — and genuinely maddening.

In both cases, a bold infrastructure project was hedged from the outset against its own failure. In both cases, the decisions made to accommodate that hedge were embedded in the physical fabric of the buildings. And in both cases, when the projects succeeded, those design decisions remained — permanent monuments to pessimism, paid for daily by the people who actually use them.

German exhibition infrastructure was designed for success from the start. Frankfurt, Cologne, Düsseldorf, Hanover — wide access roads, logical contractor logistics, proper parking. Anyone who has worked across both will know exactly what I mean.

My team lost three hours yesterday. Three hours sitting in a queue that exists because someone, decades ago, thought ExCeL might become a Tesco.

Makes you depressed.