As you walk into the new Friends Experience at the Royal Docks, you’re greeted by a New York cab. On the far side of the vast hall is an exact recreation of the famous Central Perk coffee shop – which in a week will be fully functioning – and in the distance I can make out the apartment shared by the eponymous friends, with its familiar yellow wallpaper and green shelves.
Clad in a high-vis vest and hard hat, I’m the first journalist to take a tour of the biggest new entertainment hub to be built in London since the overhaul of the O2 Arena 15 years ago.
Next door to the Friends Experience is the similarly under-construction Formula 1 experience, although the only things on four wheels I can see are a small army of forklift trucks and cherry-pickers.
From Friends Experience to Fame Factory
Later this year these installations will be joined by Fame Factory, an immersive experience that casts you as a famous movie star or pop singer, created by the company that curates the live acts at the Super Bowl. “You’ll go into your own booth and take on a new persona. When you come out, your agent will pick you up in a golf cart,” says Damian Norman, director of immersive entertainment and events at ExCeL London. There’s a private jet experience and recording booths or catwalks, depending on the experience you pick. He says the target market encompasses company away days, birthday parties, bar mitzvahs and date nights.
Norman says he’s also working with “one of the world’s biggest IPs” for a soon-to-be-announced new addition (in a City A.M. exclusive of sorts, I can tell you it’s not Marvel or Star Wars).
“We want a certain amount of diversity for different age groups. We’re not a pure play family destination, we want to be able to have that mix through the day and evening. You need to have a point of difference between the immersive brands, they can’t all be the same. They have to offer different things, crossing different cultures and genres.”
The new waterfront strip at Royal Docks, which will house the Friends Experience among other things
On the Royal Docks waterfront
It’s not only the indoor space that’s being redeveloped – the waterfront has been transformed from what looked like the outside of a provincial shopping mall to a stylish strip with a brand new facade, which will soon be home to coffee vans and food vendors. There are even “aspirations” – pending approval – to moor boats on the riverside housing more food and drink options.
“It’s such a rare opportunity to get access to a body of water like this. We’ve created a human scale with the brick arches, whilst being very aware of the historic architecture of the Royal Docks – we were inspired by Coal Drops Yard and the Southbank.”
In all there will be six “chapters” in the Immerse LDN development, with a total investment of some £300m, with 2.5m visitors a year expected.
Still, even with the guaranteed footfall from the ExCeL centre, will people be persuaded to take the trip to the Royal Docks?
“We’re actually a good destination for it. ExCeL already attracts 4m people a year. We have the Elizabeth line, 1,400 car parking spaces, 2,800 hotel rooms on site. We’ve got all of the infrastructure you need,” says Norman. “We’re already very, very busy on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays because we’re predominantly a trade audience, which is the inverse of the leisure peak. One of the things we’ve never done is focus on the post-6pm economy because most of our shows finish at that time. We’re now making a play for that audience on the waterfront.”
So why haven’t they done all of this sooner? Isn’t that a massive missed trick?
“Yeah, it probably was.”
An all-day dining district
The plan now is to turn the ExCeL into a morning to night destination, providing everything from breakfast through to brunch, lunch, dinner and post event drinks.
“We want to create a space that people will gravitate towards that will become a natural evening home.
So-called “immersive experiences” – a term so loose and baggy as to be essentially meaningless – have become hugely popular in recent years, with the likes of Secret Cinema and Punchdrunk leading the charge. But Norman says Immerse LDN has the jump on other brands as it can offer purpose built spaces with pre-existing infrastructure. “Toilets can pretty much kill a project,” he says, shaking his head. Being the landlord of the estate, Immerse LDN can also offer guarantees on tenancy lengths for the installations, which can run to as long as 10 years.
The project will also benefit from the £2.5bn regeneration of Silvertown on the other side of the river, which will soon be linked by a new S-shaped bridge. The jewel in this particular crown is the vast Millennium Mills building, which has lain largely derelict since 1981. To put this in perspective, I wrote a feature on the building almost a decade ago and developers finally broke ground last year.
With the Friends experience set to open next week and the F1 coming later this month, you won’t have to wait long to see what all the fuss is about – time will tell if this long-neglected strip of the Thames is soon to become its hippest new spot.
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