Back-to-back events mark our return to business

Event activity at our venue has been reignited. After 15 months in the dark, our event spaces have been brought back to life, starting with consecutive event days in June.

Over 650 guests passed through our doors across Thursday 17^th and Friday 18^th as the Prem Rawat 50^th Anniversary Celebration (pictured) and Archdiocesan Leadership Conference, respectively, marked the restart of events at the ICC.

Early evening on Thursday 17^th, Prem Rawat took to the Hall 3 stage to address the room at his celebration on the 50^th anniversary of his arrival in the United Kingdom. The globally renowned speaker entertained the audience for the 90-minute sold out show, which was further streamed to virtual ticket holders across the world.

Hilary Davis, Prem Rawat’s Global Events Manager, commented: “It was fantastic to be back delivering events to a live audience and an honour to be the first event back at the ICC. The health and safety measures implemented by the venue ensured the event was COVID-safe and we look forward to working with the ICC team again in the future.”

The ICC Event Management Team then turned our venue around overnight, undertaking all health and safety procedures as per ICC Venue Protect, before setup of the Archdiocesan Leadership Conference began. Well-versed in swift changeover operations, this posed no challenges to the expert team.

Senior leaders from Catholic schools and multi academies across the region then gathered for the Archdiocesan Leadership Conference on Friday 18^th. Also in attendance, and leading the celebration of the mass at the end of the conference, was Archbishop Bernard Longley. The conference, with its theme of After the Storm: the God who speaks to us now, focused on rejuvenating leaders post pandemic and, like the previous day’s event, was broadcast to many more virtually. The digital setup provided and managed by the highly experienced ICC Technical & Production Team. The conference also called upon the services of in-house caterer, Amadeus, who were able to showcase their adapted offering for the first time at the ICC.

Yvonne Salter Wright, Deputy Director (Leadership and Governance) at the Birmingham Diocesan Education Service, said: “We’re pleased to have finally held our event again in person at the ICC. It was important for us to bring our senior leaders from across the Archdiocese family together again in a way that was fully inclusive. For many, this meant in person attendance and the ICC handled this extremely safely with many delegates commenting on how impressed they were with the arrangements at the venue. For many of our leaders, in person attendance was just not going to be possible. The additional virtual option led to opening the event up to many more of our leaders than we had been able to do in the past.  The technical capabilities of the venue and the team in order to achieve this were superb. As we’ve had on many occasions at the venue, this was another fantastic experience.”

Allan Boyle, General Manager for NEC Group Conventions, further added: “We are delighted to be back hosting events again at the ICC after such a long period of closure. We reopened our Mall as a public thoroughfare a few weeks ago and these first returning events mark the next successful step in our business recovery.

“We look forward to welcoming many more visitors and delegates to the venue in the coming weeks and months, whilst continuing to work hard behind the scenes in order to prepare our venue for a full reopening and the return of larger scale events.”