Stand walls and panels for Olympia London

The venue and what it demands

Olympia is one of the oldest exhibition halls in Europe still in use, and its character sets the rules. It is a listed Victorian building in a dense part of west London, which has three consequences a contractor feels immediately.

Access is constrained. Loading is regulated, the streets around are residential, and London's congestion and emission zones apply to the vehicle bringing your material. That pushes everything towards fewer, fuller, better-timed deliveries rather than several trips.

Nothing attaches to the building. On a listed structure you do not fix into the fabric, which means your walls have to be freestanding and stable on their own. Above about 3,000 mm that is a question of corner returns and of the connection system, not of the panel — a tall wall with no return is a sail, and in a hall with a great deal of air movement that is not theoretical.

And it photographs. The barrel-vaulted glass roof throws a lot of daylight across the stands, which is flattering to a clean surface and merciless to a poor edge or a visible joint. It is a venue where the RAL-lacquered panel, sprayed in our own finishing shop rather than painted in the hall, earns its cost.

Practically: what arrives must arrive finished — edges done, cut-outs machined, connectors in the box. Cutting a honeycomb panel on site means opening the core and losing the edge, and at Olympia it also means losing a slot you will not get back.

The main shows

The shows we are asked about most at this venue:

• Ideal Home Show — consumer, very high footfall: the material is handled by the public, and white MFC outlasts a gloss lacquer over a long run.
• E-commerce Expo and the London tech shows — screens built in, so cable runs prepared in manufacture and the reinforced version where a screen hangs.
• The property and lifestyle shows — high finish, seamless runs, lacquered walls.
• The many mid-size B2B shows of the London calendar, with short build-ups and stands that come back each year.

What we supply for a stand

What leaves Fontanelle for a build is almost always the same package:

• standard PSL panel for the stand walls, 40 or 50 mm, up to 6,000 mm tall;
• fire-rated version where the venue requires it — and in the UK the requirement needs reading twice, documentation included;
• stand doors, assembled and ironmongered, reversible, with vision panel or panic bar;
• levelling platforms, drilled for adjustable feet, for a raised floor;
• alignment rails, I·L·T·X connectors and cover strips for dry assembly, with no saw on the stand.

How and in what time we deliver

Standard sizes from our warehouse in the Netherlands. Our warehouse in Waalwijk holds thousands of raw honeycomb panels in standard sizes, ready to ship with no production lead time. It is about 95 km from Hook of Holland: overnight ferry to Harwich, then roughly 140 km to Olympia London — instead of 1,400 km by road from Italy, and cheaper. UK customs formalities still apply. More on the Waalwijk warehouse.

Made-to-measure and special versions are built in Fontanelle, province of Treviso, and that is where the lorries leave from. London is roughly 1,400 km away: delivery direct to the hall in your build-up slot, or to your store if you would rather prepare the stand first.

Great Britain is outside the EU, so every consignment carries an import declaration. Nothing about that is difficult, but it is sequential: we ask for sizes confirmed about three weeks out, and for the importer of record to be named at order stage rather than at dispatch — the whole picture is here.

Standard sizes are held in stock. We normally dispatch within 7 days of order confirmation, often sooner. No minimum order, single pieces included, and no surcharge for non-standard sizes: the price of the next standard size up applies.

Frequently asked questions

A stand to cost at Olympia London?

Send us the drawing, the sizes and the quantities: you get a written quote, normally within 24 working hours, in English, German, French or Italian.