Town Hall by Bottaccio, the reimagined Grade II-listed former town hall a five-minute walk from King’s Cross St Pancras, throws open its doors from 25 to 27 September for Vision Festival: three days of culture, science and live performance with Rory Sutherland, The Guilty Feminist Live, and a King’s Cross-wide OffScript Summit among the first names announced.
Vision Festival is the debut event from Town Hall by Bottaccio, the 1937 building that spent eight years under restoration by Purcell architects before reopening as one of King’s Cross’s newest event spaces. Programmed by Town Hall’s director of programming, Michael John Harris, the festival pulls together the neighbourhood’s cultural, scientific and creative institutions for a shared weekend of talks, performance and satellite events, both inside the building and across partner venues throughout King’s Cross.
A building that broadcast Paul Robeson’s voice across the Atlantic
The bit we didn’t know until we started digging: this building has form as a stage for exactly this kind of gathering. Before it was Camden’s, it was St Pancras Town Hall, and on 26 May 1957 it hosted one of the more remarkable nights in London’s Cold War cultural history. Paul Robeson, barred from travelling abroad by a US passport revocation, sang from a New York studio while his voice reached the hall live down the newly opened transatlantic telephone cable, a piece of Cold War theatre that let him perform in London without setting foot outside America. Less than two years later, in January 1959, the same building hosted Claudia Jones’s first indoor Caribbean carnival, directed by Edric Connor and featuring Cleo Laine, the event now widely credited as a forerunner of Notting Hill Carnival and televised nationally by the BBC.
Town Hall by Bottaccio’s own account of its history adds Leonard Bernstein rehearsing here with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1970, a 21-year-old Simon Rattle conducting in the same hall, and three decades of the St Pancras Arts Festival filling it with opera, jazz and poetry. Vision Festival is explicitly framed by its organisers as a revival of that tradition, a building that’s spent decades as a meeting place for artists, activists and technologists throwing its doors open again.
What’s actually on
The opening night (25 September) pairs Sophia Club’s Attention, Please: How to Thrive with a Hypercurious Mind, neuroscientist Dr Anne-Laure Le Cunff on curiosity and distraction alongside artist Tim Etchells and composer Angharad Davies, with The Guilty Feminist Live and Deborah Frances-White’s new Road to Gilead Project. Saturday’s headline event is the OffScript Summit, a full day of talks and workshops on careers and creative work featuring Rory Sutherland, Fleabag and Baby Reindeer producer Francesca Moody MBE, The List author Yomi Adegoke, Arcade Media’s Jordan Schwarzenberger and neuroscientist Beau Lotto, running alongside a free lunchtime talk from The Mills Fabrica on fashion and food sustainability and an evening of The School of Life’s emotional education. Sunday closes the weekend with Backgammon & Wax, a 40-player backgammon tournament soundtracked by vinyl DJs and hosted by Doc Brown.
Beyond the building itself, the festival is backed by a genuinely wide founding partner list for a debut event, the Aga Khan Centre, British Library, Francis Crick Institute, Google, Kings Place, Knowledge Quarter, The Mills Fabrica, Tileyard, Tom Dixon and UAL Central Saint Martins among them, with more satellite programming at partner venues across the neighbourhood still to be announced. Michael John Harris, Town Hall’s director of programming, says the idea was to bring together “extraordinary organisations that sit within a few streets of one another” to showcase “one of the world’s richest concentrations of culture, science and creativity.” Camden Council’s Sabrina Francis has welcomed the festival as a celebration of the borough’s “creative and curious spirit.”
The London x London Take: this is a first-year festival, so we’d treat the programme as a starting point rather than the finished picture, more satellite events and venues are still to be confirmed. Of what’s live now, the OffScript Summit is the one with genuine unique value, that kind of access to Rory Sutherland, Francesca Moody and Jordan Schwarzenberger in one room doesn’t come around often, and the family bundle makes it a realistic day out rather than a single-ticket splurge. The Guilty Feminist Live and the Sophia Club talk both suit a single evening out well if the summit’s too much of a commitment. We’d book early for anything at Town Hall itself rather than the wider satellite programme, it’s a genuinely striking room and, on this history, clearly a venue this city takes seriously when something worth broadcasting is happening inside it.
Need to know
- Where: Town Hall by Bottaccio, Bidborough Street, London WC1H 9AU
- When: Friday 25 to Sunday 27 September 2026
- Price: Free to £160, depending on the event (family bundles and concessions available on ticketed events)
- Booking: Full programme and tickets at visionfestival.co.uk
