Do you miss the London Boat Show

[ashtead]

On our trips to excel the drive and parking was easy and it always seemed quiet perhaps given space - shame it ended but I doubt the pricing worked for smaller exhibitors - there did seem to be a fair number of non boating people who seemed to have wondered in by accident looking for caravans maybe - it might have worked better in Brum though ?

 

[Juan Twothree]

Used to love going to Earl's Court. I tended to spend most of the day looking at all the smaller interesting stands upstairs.

Sadly the world has moved on.

 

[Daydream believer]

On our trips to excel the drive and parking was easy and it always seemed quiet perhaps given space - shame it ended but I doubt the pricing worked for smaller exhibitors - there did seem to be a fair number of non boating people who seemed to have wondered in by accident looking for caravans maybe - it might have worked better in Brum though ?

A chandler friend of mine preferred Excel because he & the staff could get home easily at night & back in to london in the morning. That made a big saving in hotel bills & travel bills were cheaper just driving the van a few miles in to London. However, in the end he no longer goes to the Southampton one. He says it is not worth the hassle due to cost & logistics problems are just ridiculous.
Many go to shows for the chandlers. I expect that they are looking at stuff expecting the chandler to be a show case, so they can go away & buy online. So the return for the chandler is reduced.

 

[Goldie]

We will have to agree to differ. For many years we lived in Devon and found both Earls Court and Excel extremely easy to get to. I don’t understand why people find the tube and DLR to Excel difficult. Earls Court might have been slightly quicker but it didn’t make much difference.

I was being slightly tongue in cheek and just pointing out that not everyone lives just up the road (A13 in this case). We used to make the effort for Earls Court, but only bothered for Excel once. That was more due to the show than the travelling although we are about 2 hours further west than I think you were.

 

[STATUE]

Bring back Earl's Court, cheek by jowl with everyone so you had to talk to them. Bring back Cliff Mitchelmore on the Tonight programme live reporting the progress of large yachts with traffic lights and street lamps being removed.

In the past? It could be in the future !

 

[st599]

Bring back Earl's Court, cheek by jowl with everyone so you had to talk to them. Bring back Cliff Mitchelmore on the Tonight programme live reporting the progress of large yachts with traffic lights and street lamps being removed.

In the past? It could be in the future !

I'd have a look at Earl's Court on Google Streetview if I were you.

 

[Steamkettle]

Sadly, it might not be too long before the same question is asked of Southampton.

 

[potentillaCO32]

Sailing as a leisure activity is a shrinking activity in the UK.
Lovely contrast watching french TV and seeing the vendee globe on national TV every day.

 

[The Q]

Earls court was a train trip, excel was too difficult,
Alexandra palace for the dinghy show was acceptable by car.
Moving it to Farnborough adds an hour each way.
Southampton show, never been, too far.
Birmingham went to a model railway show there, took 5 hours each way due to fog. I'm not doing that again for sails ng or anything else..

Oh I'm on the north Norfolk coast.

 

[dunedin]

Earls court was a train trip, excel was too difficult,
Alexandra palace for the dinghy show was acceptable by car.
Moving it to Farnborough adds an hour each way.
Southampton show, never been, too far.
Birmingham went to a model railway show there, took 5 hours each way due to fog. I'm not doing that again for sails ng or anything else..

Oh I'm on the north Norfolk coast.

Not big on travel then! But not everybody lives in Norfolk.

We used to do Edinburgh Weymouth and back for weekend junior training events. And some did the same but from 3 hrs further north.
Depends on motivation

 

[justanothersailboat]

Is it though? Or is it that there are more sailors, but more of them are Med charterers rather than people saving up for a little bilge keeler? Last stats I saw showed sailing engagement stepping back up to near-pre-2020 levels.

(there's a separate problem that moorings and marinas are full of boats that see little use, but some of this is an illusion - if you sail a few big trips and I sail every weekend, each of us thinks the other's boat never goes anywhere)

It's definitely a problem that the country's transport network is horribly London-centric and that makes it slow and annoying to get to Southampton from some parts, both obviously distant ones and some surprisingly not-so-far pockets.

 

[Greg2]

Earls court was a train trip, excel was too difficult,
Alexandra palace for the dinghy show was acceptable by car.
Moving it to Farnborough adds an hour each way.
Southampton show, never been, too far.
Birmingham went to a model railway show there, took 5 hours each way due to fog. I'm not doing that again for sails ng or anything else..

Oh I'm on the north Norfolk coast.

We are in Norfolk and thought that Excel was a very easy drive to get to. Straight down the A11 / M11 and then round in the North Circular and no problem parking. Also think that Southampton is well worth the trip. To be fair we are south side of the City and I don’t think the NDR was there when Excel was still on.
.

 

[Ian_Edwards]

I'm sufficiently old to remember going to the London Boat show in Olympia!
When it first moved to Earls Court, I got lost, confused by the triangular floor plan of the main hall.
In 1968 my new Merlin Rocket was Chippendale's exhibit.







The mid photo is me age 21, waiting for my father to bring the car to tow it home.
The boats name was "Sock it to me" after Rowen and Martin's late night satirical TV show.

Later, I always seemed to be able to arange a meeting in London and later still in Southampton, on a Friday or a Monday, so I could fly down to London, or Southampton. so I rarely missed a boat show. Aberdeen is along way from London, and it was amazing how often the I had a meeting in London or Southampton around boat show time.
The last time I went to a boat show would be mid 2000's, to Excel, I was there on Monday morning and it was dead in the water. Coincidentally I met a work colleague, who also just happened to have a meeting in London that day. We agreed it wasn't worth the effort.
I've thought about going to Southampton since I retired, but it's expensive to travel down. If want to order something I wait for the boat show discounts, then phone up the supplier, ask if I can get the discount, I usually can, so I order online or over the phone. I got 20% off my last set of sail, which was well worth having, during the Southampton boat show without leaving the boat.
I might go to Boot one year, My brother in law lives quite close by, and I can fly from Aberdeen via Schiphol.

My view is the prompters got greedy, charge too much for the stands, tried to diversify by making it more "accessible" to the general public. They lost their core audience, and priced out the suppliers. Capitalism at it's very best. I see Southampton going that way.
Although I've never been, the Dinghy Show at Farnborough seems better organized, I'd be tempted to go but in my late 70's my competitive dinghy sailing days are over. I'm quite happy sailing my Southerly 46RS around the Western Isles.

 

[justanothersailboat]

Selling chandlers' supplies at a discount is never going to make sense in an era of price-sensitive online shopping. So people old enough to remember, and want, the show as a discount spree will be forever disappointed.

The question is are there enough of the younger generation who don't expect money off something generic you can order offline from chandlerychainstore.com, but love a nautical day out and spend a fortune somehow or other, to fund shows' evolution into a new form?

In this family Dad's wallet says yes...

 

[flaming]

My view is the prompters got greedy, charge too much for the stands, tried to diversify by making it more "accessible" to the general public. They lost their core audience, and priced out the suppliers. Capitalism at it's very best. I see Southampton going that way.
Although I've never been, the Dinghy Show at Farnborough seems better organized, I'd be tempted to go but in my late 70's my competitive dinghy sailing days are over. I'm quite happy sailing my Southerly 46RS around the Western Isles.

Don't forget that the promoters are National Boat Shows, who are a fully owned subsidiary of the British Marine Federation. Now just called "British Marine".

So, the industry's trade body, not a for profit organisation. There was (is) a full board of industry people monitoring everything. Those guys aren't approving costs that they have to pay for giggles... Stand costs are what they are because that's what exhibitions cost.

Full disclosure, i worked there, marketing the shows, for about 3 years. I was specifically hired to do that because I was a sailor. And tasked with putting on attractions that would attract sailors. We had amazing talks from experts, we built a full size "boat" with real mast, mounted it in front of fans and gave spinnaker and cruising chute handling demos. We had life raft demos on the pool, model yacht racing, match racing demos, you name it.

Didn't matter though. Very few people were actually bothered about all that, despite what they told us in feedback sessions etc. Frequently expert talks went ahead to 5 people.
All that mattered in the end was the number of boats exhibiting. And as costs went up, and boat purchases went down, company after company decided it wasn't working for them. And so more people went to the Show and complained about how few boats there were, and so on....

 

[Seastoke]

Boat Life is owned by NEC.

 

[flaming]

Boat Life is owned by NEC.

And has been cancelled….

 

[capnsensible]

Bygone era.

Crowded, noisy, music, great atmosphere.

Joke of the day over the broadcast before the doors opened to the public. Cheap hotels a walk away. Pubs and restaurants crowded with exhibitors, networking at its best, getting to know who is who and where. Fab.

Even with a shared stand....which didn't exactly work, Excel got very difficult to justify. We binned it after a couple of go's.

Shouldn't think exhibitions like this will ever recover, people's expectations have fundamentally changed. That's life.

 

[GEM43]

Good Lord no. Even with free tickets the Excel was a difficult to get to location - I am not a fan of London travel - and the place was soulless.

Agree with that but I’d add that the Southampton show is at the wrong time of the year, I’m sailing until mid October so I’ve not been to SIBS for fifteen years or more.

 

[Richborough]

I miss the Beaulieu boat jumble. Great day out. Turn it into a mini holiday camping local good days long gone