2026 marks the 75th anniversary of London’s Royal Festival Hall and the venue will celebrate with a packed schedule of events and activities.
The anniversary coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain, a major national exhibition and fair which took place in 1951 to showcase British achievements in science, technology, arts, and industrial design.
The Royal Festival Hall was built as part of the event and is located at the Southbank Centre along with creative spaces and a gallery.
The schedule of anniversary events includes activities for school groups. The venue also welcomes primary and secondary schools to visit the Hayward Gallery and the National Poetry Library.
What’s on?
Among the activities for schools are Imagine the Future which sees the Southbank Centre team up with more than 3,500 Year 5-7 school pupils, including more than 2,500 from schools in Lambeth, and renowned poet Lemn Sissay to imagine the future.
Pupils are invited to create their own visual poems to express their hopes and dreams for the future. To help build confidence around teaching poetry, teachers will be supported through resources and CPD sessions.
On 10th July each participating school will meet a poet who will run a workshop exploring visual poetry and a line of poetry from each participating class will be featured at the Southbank Centre in a large-scale installation. Schools will also be able to visit the public art installation in July during Poetry International Festival.
Reframe: Inspire Schools is a creative multimedia project for KS3 pupils in schools from Birmingham, London and Manchester. The project is currently looking for schools to get involved.
The project is aimed at inspiring young people’s interests in different creative fields and will get pupils working collaboratively with artist-educators to weave together poetry, visual art, and digital skills to create their own online publication.
School visits
The Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre hosts a schedule of changing exhibitions and welcomes schools for gallery visits to help pupils develop artistic and creative skills and gain insights into roles including curators and workshop leaders.
School takeover days are available for groups of up to 30 primary school pupils and 20 secondary school pupils and include an in-depth look at the exhibition content, related activities and the opportunity to take the lead during mini-workshops and activities.
The National Poetry Library on the fifth floor of the Royal Festival Hall welcomes KS2 groups to take part in a choice of two programmes.
Poetry Explorers challenges pupils to explore visual poetry, spoken poetry and poems about animals and learn how to use an index in a book and find items in a library. Letters Home is an interactive workshop built around poems written during World War One. It introduces students to visual poetry, sound poetry and typography and tasks pupils with writing their own poems.
Three programmes are available for secondary school schools. The Poetry Box for KS3 is a workshop that links poetry and science and encourages students to experiment with writing their own poetry inspired by an interactive box, where they view microscopic slides.
Teacher-led sessions for KS3-4 allow teachers to use the library as a resource for leading their own sessions, with pre-prepared books available on particular themes. For KS5, A Dictionary Story is a workshop which invites students to think about the relationship between visual art and poetry.
For more information about school visits to the Southbank Centre, visit www.southbankcentre.co.uk/create-learn/schools.
