• Swindon & Wiltshire Events
• Friday January 16 2026

Festival of Tomorrow and Science and Innovation Park launch new Hawking Building series

Swindon’s popular Festival of Tomorrow is teaming up with the Science Museum Group’s Science and Innovation Park at nearby Wroughton for a new series of events aimed at people wanting to dive deeper into science and technology.

The series of four evening events, which will be hosted in the Science and Innovation Park’s new Hawking Building, are now live for bookings along with the first wave of evening festival events aimed at adults and older teenagers.

Audiences will enjoy talks and panels experts from different fields, as well as from the Science Museum itself.

The hybrid events will also include live links to contributors from around the UK giving visitors behind the scenes access to working laboratories not usually accessible to the public, as well as after-hours into the Science Museum in London.

Whilst the events will be streamed live online, with viewers able to ask questions remotely, early bookers will also be able to join a limited of spaces in the live audience inside the Hawking Building itself.

Those in-person audiences will also have the option to book onto four different specially curated tours of areas of the museum collections linked to each topic, which will take place immediately after each event.

The Hawking Building Series will cover topics from the future of lab-grown meat to NASA’s latest Artemis mission sending astronauts back to the moon, the future of robots in your home (pictured), and even Eurovision’s surprising role in driving innovation in broadcast technologies around the world.

Dr Roderick Hebden, director of the Festival of Tomorrow, said: “The Science and Innovation Park is a truly unique facility, right on our doorstep in Swindon, and we’re incredibly privileged to be able to bring this opportunity to people in Swindon, as well as audiences online.”

Matt Moore, director of the Science and Innovation Park, added: “We’re excited to be working even closer with the Festival of Tomorrow this year, both by opening up the Hawking Building to the public for these events, as well as running our own shows and workshops as part of the hugely successful Festival of Tomorrow schools programme.”

The first wave of Festival of Tomorrow events, which are available to book now, include the legendary Robin Ince headlining a comedy show in Old Town, a Star Hop at Lydiard House, nature-themed events run with the new Western Forest, and a chance to debate the future of surveillance, and its role in tracking and preventing seasonal and pandemic outbreaks of disease, hosted by the University of Oxford Pandemic Sciences Institute and History of Science Museum.

The Hawking Building is a massive, modern storage and research facility at the Science and Innovation Park in Wroughton, housing over 300,000 objects for the Science Museum Group’s collection, including everything from historic vehicles and medical instruments to space exploration objects.

Maned after theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, the facility opened in October 2024.