Plans have begun for the Students’ Union’s UCL200 Summer Festival celebrating student life with activities to showcase the new and improved Portico.
Occurring from the 2 to 6 June, the aim of the festival is to be student-led, with a classical music concert known as “UCL Proms”, a Film Festival (in collaboration with UCL Film Society), a Big Debate, and a Bicentenary Ball set to end the celebrations.
The festival will also include an artsUCL Fringe, with “up to 275 performance spaces open to all students” running from 1 June to 13 June.
The Main Quad's capacity is 1500, as set by the UCL Fire Team, with the surrounding buildings bringing capacity to 2000. The Union will fill the capacity through a ticketing system with the Ball accommodating almost 2000 guests and the Film Festival accommodating 600 people.
With the first large-scale event for the new Portico and Quad, the Union hope to plan the best method of sizing for the event, mentioning limiting the capacity for safety at a Welfare Zone meeting.
With the festival being held in early June, many students may have already left UCL for the summer, risking the possibility of low engagement and making it harder for the event to be genuinely student-led.
Despite this, the Union Executive have teased a jam-packed year of activities, beginning in February, the proposed reopening date of the Quad.
The four main events are set to take place in the evening, whilst the day time activities are still to be decided, but designed to attract a mass audience of students and staff alike to join the festivities.
Activities and Engagement Officer Ana Boikova insisted that these events will be the “biggest and best we have ever done.”
Students can still join the Student Steering Group to influence and shape the festival.
Beyond the Union, other events include a light show, “UCL Illuminated”, which is taking place between the 11 February and 13 February. The SSEES Film festival, which is screening four different films, is between the 25 February and 25 March.
A UCL200 exhibition documenting “photography, objects, artefacts, stories, dialogue and interactive experiences” of UCL’s history, is taking place from February onwards.
A Union spokesperson said:
“The dates were chosen because they’re at the end of the exam period and we hope many, many thousands of students join a huge programme of activity over the week (including the artsUCL fringe with more than 200 performance slots which itself extends a week later to the 11 June). The Summer Festival week starts straight after the Union Awards week, so we hope this a brilliant end to the year for students, and good reason not to head home/leave London straight away.”