This summer, East Bank invites local residents, Londoners and visitors to discover a programme of events celebrating creativity and innovation. Taking place across Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, the summer programme brings together East Bank’s cultural institutions, world leading universities and residents of east London, with music, dance, sport, art and more.

Activity includes:

• The Great Get Together: Returning on Saturday 15 June, this is Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park's free community celebration inspired by the creative talent across east London which showcases the best of East Bank’s local communities through music, dance, arts, sports, and food for everyone to enjoy.

• East Bank’s inaugural Summer Programme: Twelve years since the Olympic and Paralympic Games were hosted by London, East Bank’s Olympic spirit continues with activities from hip-hop battles, watch-parties and taster sessions for Breaking, a new addition to the Olympics this year, to exhibitions, DJ sets, and a festival of engineering.

• Public art reveals: Lemon Meringue by Michael Landy will be installed along the waterfront at East Bank and celebrates traditional and newly invented Cockney Rhyming Slang in a series of large fluorescent signs. Lubna Chowdhary’s Temporal Trace, inspired by the South Indian ritual of “Kolam”, is a large-scale permanent drawing of fluid lines and dots across the waterfront. A.A. Murakami, the artist duo behind Studio Swine, have created the sculpture In Mountains Shadow, composed of overlapping mesh screens designed to slow the wind.

East Bank is made up of UCL East and London College of Fashion, UAL (both opened Autumn 2023), Sadler’s Wells East (opening 2024), V&A East Museum and Storehouse and BBC Music Studios (opening 2025). This collaborative partnership is rooted in the diverse communities of east London, connecting people through immersive and interactive cross programming, activities, and career opportunities. It represents the biggest cultural investment from the Mayor of London and is supported by Foundation for Future London, the connecting charity of East Bank, along with Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the communities of the Olympic Boroughs.

Tamsin Ace, Director of East Bank, says:

“As we continue to celebrate London’s Olympic legacy, twelve years on from the Olympic and Paralympic Games, East Bank will continue to be a place for people to come together and enjoy the transformative power of culture, the arts, and innovation. For this very reason we are especially proud of the inaugural Summer Programme at East Bank. East Bank is all about collaboration, and for our first summer programme we are experimenting with all that is on offer in the area for an array of activity that truly reflects the East Bank spirit.”

Justine Simons OBE, Deputy Mayor for Culture and the Creative Industries, says:

“It’s exciting to announce a vibrant summer of music, dance, sport and art, brought together by our capital’s leading cultural institutions at East Bank. With the Paris Olympics taking place across the Channel this summer, it’s a fantastic opportunity to celebrate our Olympic legacy at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Enriched by stunning new artworks reflecting our diverse creative talent, East Bank will be buzzing with entertainment for families, visitors and locals alike, as we build a better and more prosperous London for everyone.”

SUMMER PROGRAMME - Full list of activity for the Summer Programme includes:

Great Get Together | 15 June

In celebration of its ten-year anniversary, the annual Great Get Together returns to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park on Saturday 15 June. This free community event brings together local residents, families, and friends through entertaining activities across music, dance, arts, sports, and food. Main stage performances, activities and workshops will be provided from all five East Bank partners alongside the Park’s community partners. From electrifying performances to interactive workshops and different cuisines, there is something for everyone. Friends and families are invited to celebrate East London, East Bank, and honour London’s Olympic legacy as the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games approach. The Great Get Together is supported by Foundation for Future London’s Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, funded by Westfield Stratford City.

Register your interest on the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park website

Find a selection of Great Get Together images via this link.

UCL Festival of Engineering | Tuesday 15 July | UCL East

Explore technologies and breakthroughs in popular culture that will inspire the next generation of creators and problem solvers, as UCL’s celebration of 150 years of advancements in engineering at the university comes to Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.

LCF Undergraduate Class of 2024 | July

London College of Fashion (LCF), UAL, a global leader in fashion education, will host its annual undergraduate presentation and exhibition, LCF Undergraduate Class of 2024 (LCF24), this July. Featuring work from LCF’s design, communication and business schools, LCF designers will demonstrate how they look beyond the traditional notions of fashion to imagine a new and exciting future. Visitors will have an unparalleled glimpse into the future of fashion through the mediums of design, film, photography and more.

LCF24 salon shows will take place at Protein Studios in Shoreditch from 11 - 12 July, with the LCF24 exhibition open at LCF’s new East Bank home from 17 – 24 July.

Location: Protein Studios (EC2A 3EY) and LCF, UAL (East Bank, 105 Carpenter’s Road, E20 2AR)
Free Admission

Follow LCF at @lcflondon_ for all LCF24 details and programming as they are released.

V&A East x BeauBeaus Art Club Made in east London commission | July

In July, new Made in east London commissioned artworks will go on display across V&A East Museum’s exterior, created by artists 18-year-old Marley Robson and 20-year-old Dani Novis. The artworks are the winning commissions from a collaborative programme between V&A East and BeauBeaus, a community-first café in Whitechapel owned by artist Slawn and his family. V&A East invited BeauBeaus Art Club to respond to the theme Made in east London, and V&A East curatorial, brand and campaigns teams worked together with artist Teoni Hinds to support the art club’s members to develop their responses to be considered for the paid commissions. This is both Marley and Dani’s first public artwork commission.

Location: V&A East Museum exterior, East Bank
Free Admission

Follow @vam_east on Instagram for more information

Hip Hop Games | 3 August

Sadler’s Wells presents the Hip Hop Games on Stratford Waterfront this summer. On Saturday 3 August, 8 east London dancers will compete across two teams in a hip hop dance improvisation game with a series of different creative challenges. BBC 1Xtra will present a range of DJs for this interactive event which sees audiences have their say on the winning team.

Location: Stratford Waterfront, 12-7pm  
Free Admission  

Academy Breakin’ Convention Summer Sessions | 5 – 8 August 

Academy Breakin’ Convention (ABC), located at East Bank partner Sadler’s Wells East, will offer a free full-time further education programme for creative and talented 16-19 year olds, covering the foundations of hip hop theatre. ABC is running ‘Summer Sessions’ where audiences can learn the foundations of hip hop theatre for free. Across 4 high impact days, ABC will break down the basics of Breaking, DJing, Emceeing, Graffiti, Music Production, Popping and Hip Hop Social Dance, exploring these elements through a theatrical lens. Suitable for ages 14 – 17. 

Location: East London Dance, The Talent House, 3 Sugar House Ln, London E15 2QS, 10am - 3pm
Free Admission

Breaking Watch Parties | 9 & 10 August  

As Breaking makes its debut in this year’s Paris 2024 Olympic Games, Sadler’s Wells is inviting visitors to watch the Breaking Olympic Programme at a live watching party, accompanied by DJs from BBC 1Xtra. Breaking is a dance form which is celebrated across East Bank, driven by Academy Breakin’ Convention at East Bank partner Sadler’s Wells East. Location: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park   Free Admission  

For more information on Sadler’s Wells East’s summer activity please visit https://www.sadlerswells.com/your-visit/sadlers-wells-east/welcome-to-sadlers-wells-east/ and follow https://twitter.com/Sadlers_Wells and Sadler's Wells (@sadlers_wells) on Instagram for live updates.

BBC at All Points East | 16-18 August & 23-25 August

East Bank partner BBC Music Studios will be present at All Points East Festival in Victoria Park. On 21st August, BBC 1Xtra will programme the ultimate 'Amplify Your Music Career' seminar, just before its mainstage takeover. Young attendees will discover the power of social media for musicians, artists, producers, and more - learning how to skyrocket their career and online presence with TikTok, Instagram, and X. Then the 1Xtra DJs take over the main stage with nostalgic beats and black music hits with a potential surprise guest or two.

Location: Victoria Park
Tickets available on www.allpointseastfestival.com/tickets

Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, Dancing City: “Touch” and “Out of the Box” | 7 September

This year, East Bank is proud to partner with Greenwich+Docklands International Festival (GDIF) on their iconic annual programme of outdoor dance, Dancing City. TOUCH will be presented as part of Dancing City and combines the use of a theatrical flight of stairs and gravity-defying trampoline choreography, for which French dancer and choreographer Yoann Bourgeois has become renowned following viral performances and recent choreographic collaborations with Harry Styles, P!nk and Missy Elliott. This UK premiere will be performed to an extraordinary electro-synth Daft Punk soundtrack at Stratford Cross.

As new Stratford residents, Sadler’s Wells joins Greenwich+Docklands International Festival's Dancing City as a regular programming partner, this year co-presenting Out of the Box by The Netherlands-based company 100Hands. Out of the Box is a raw, physical and acrobatic performance for audiences of all ages, which sees a group of performers jostling for space in a human-size box. The performance is a light-hearted reflection on times of adaptation, keeping our distance and, above all, an ode to the creativity you can find within limitations. The full programme of free Dancing City events across the Park will also be announced shortly. 

Location: Stratford Cross
Free admission

For more information on the Summer Programme at East Bank, please visit www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/east-bank

East Bank public art commissions This summer, visitors can enjoy three public art commissions across East Bank which will be unveiled across the summer:

▪ In Mountains Shadow has been created by A.A. Murakami, the artists behind Studio Swine, who create immersive installations fusing science and art. For this East Bank commission, they have created a simultaneously visually captivating and function-led installation, to calm the currents in the often-windy Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Its dramatic contours and pigmentation take inspiration from traditions of Chinese landscape painting, held in the V&A’s collection.

▪ Lemon Meringue (2024) by Michael Landy celebrates traditional and newly invented Cockney rhyming slang phrases, in a series of fluorescent signs positioned across East Bank. Unique to east London, this vernacular form of speech replaces common words with a rhyming expression. In Landy’s installation, each rhyming phrase marks a place, object, or activity in the landscape through a playful take on signposting. The artwork reflects the area’s rich and creative past, while acknowledging the fluid ways that language can evolve. This project also includes a handful of new terms that speak to more recent diasporic influences on this area of London.

▪ The third is by artist Lubna Chowdhary, whose Temporal Trace is laid across Waterfront Square. This permanent artwork takes inspiration from the South Indian symbolic tradition of “Kolam” where rice flour drawings are created every day as an auspicious sign of welcome at the entrances of homes, temples and places of communal gathering. Scaled to a human stride, the artwork is a playful invitation to explore East Bank.

UCL East (University College London) also have three publicly accessible artworks in their new UCL East Marshgate campus and One Pool Street:

▪ On the ground floor of the UCL East Marshgate building with access from the public is Trēow of Time by Larry Achiampong and David Blandy - a 9m tall sculpture which takes the form of a brick-built building overwhelmed by nature. Trees grow through the heart of the ruin, while films screened in the windows show a child exploring the natural world. Trēow of Time was conceived following lengthy consultation with academics across disciplines at UCL, as well as extensive research of the history of the site and the green landscapes in east London and neighbouring Epping Forest.

▪ The second artwork at UCL East is Luke Jerram’s Gaia Globe, a magnificent 8-metrewide globe artwork that gently spins in the vast atrium of the campus’s Marshgate building and is created from detailed NASA imagery of the Earth’s surface.

▪ Mixed-media artist Emma Hart has launched her new work Hear Now in 2023. The installation is made up of clay megaphones and frying pans coated in colourful hues, attached across multiple stories to the concrete columns of the foyer of One Pool Street. The work aims to memorialise the courageous efforts of the East London Federation of Suffragettes and centre the working-class women who made up the Federation. These works are also part of a wider public art offering at UCL East, the UCL East Public Art Collection which is a permanent art collection with a range of work from UCL Slade Art School graduate students both past and present.

Exhibitions include: Power! | until September | UCL East campus

The inaugural exhibition in the UCL Culture Lab in the Marshgate building on the new UCL East campus has been made by a team of curators, researchers, students and community partners to explore the meaning of power through the divers collections at University College London alongside everyday objects from our homes and communities. Explore the exhibition and plan your visit using this link.

For more information on UCL’s exhibitions and events please visit https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucleast/news-and-events

More information on East Bank can be found at: https://www.queenelizabetholympicpark.co.uk/east-bank

Supporters of the Summer Programme The Great Get Together is supported by Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund, funded by Westfield Stratford City and delivered by Foundation for Future London along with sponsorship from: Everyone Active and kind donations from IDVerde, ABBA Voyage, Ballymore, Hadley, Here East, Lendlease, Places for People and Westfield.

For press inquiries please contact: Brunswick Arts, +44 (0)20 7404 5959 eastbank@brunswickgroup.com

--ENDS--

About East Bank
East Bank is the UK’s newest cultural quarter at the heart of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. The place where everything happens entertainment, inspiration and discovery and open to everyone who visits, lives and works in East London. It is a unique collaboration between cultural institutions, world leading universities and the people of the Growth Boroughs.

East Bank is comprised of V&A East; Sadler’s Wells East; London College of Fashion, UAL; UCL East (University College London) and the new BBC Music Studios. The scheme, driven with significant backing and funding from the Mayor of London and support from HM Government and the four Growth Boroughs, will provide skills and jobs for local people, bring over 10,000 students to the site, and attract thousands of visitors from London and beyond. East Bank will help cement the capital’s reputation as a world leader in culture, education and innovation creating 2,500 jobs, £1.5 billion of economic benefit and 600 new homes.

East Bank is rooted in the diverse communities of East London and is a reflection of the creative spirit of the Growth Boroughs and the legacy of the 2012 Games. For over a decade, East Bank institutions have worked with communities across East London to ensure they benefit from the £1.1bn investment. East Bank will build on the area’s existing creative and innovation credentials, and East Bank partners have been building relationships and delivering projects with the thriving arts, fashion, education and community organisations based in the area, including the artistic community in Hackney Wick, East London Dance, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Studio Wayne McGregor and many more.

About Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
East Bank’s home is Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a world-renowned destination nestled in the heart of east London. This iconic Park captivates visitors with world-class cultural offerings from large concerts at London Stadium and ABBA Voyage, to unique public art pieces. Alongside beautiful open spaces and a myriad of London’s best restaurants, the former London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic venues continue to stand as a testament to the city's rich history and are open for public use and events year-round. For more information on the Park you can visit the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park press pack.

About Foundation for Future London
Foundation for Future London is an independent charity established to connect the local communities of Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park with the new East Bank and its globally renowned arts, culture and educational partners to ensure equitable opportunities and fair regeneration in East London. We do this through a genuine commitment to an innovative participatory grant-making approach, capacitybuilding objectives and sustainable development. Since launching in 2015, the Foundation for Future London has connected people, places and institutions, from street markets and homeless shelters to galleries and auditoriums. The Foundation for Future London is dedicated to creating new creative employment and transformative life chances for people living, working, and studying in East London. https://future.london

Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund
Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund is an ambitious five-year programme that started in 2019 and aims to invest £10 million into local communities of Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest. This flagship project will provide new jobs, learning, training and educational programmes through the means of arts, culture, innovation, public realm and creative placemaking. The programme aims to transform and catalyse the lives and careers of people in East London by putting funding, resources and support straight into local people’s hands. The fund is supported by Westfield Stratford City and delivered by Foundation for Future London. The Westfield East Bank Creative Futures Fund aims to provide 19,000 new jobs, learning, training and educational programmes for the people and communities of Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets and Waltham Forest in the arts, culture, innovation, public realm and creative placemaking.https://future.london/programme/westfield-east-bank-creative-futures-fund