Festival 2025 is [on its way] here!

We’re there!

Kicking off on Sunday 9th November Otley Science Festival 2025 is going to be another great week with something for everyone. We begin with with an exciting daytime family friendly show then run through the week with a range of evening events, a Friday matinee and the popular Science Fair on the final Saturday plus daytime schools events for KS1 and KS2 students and a supporting art exhibition running alongside.

Here’s what happening:

  • The Science Viking, a show for all the family
  • Art Exhibition Launch of “An Exhibition By Numbers”
  • Festival week Science Café
  • Film: David Attenborough’s Ocean
  • The Science of Wine with David Lawson of Otley wine merchant Chez Vin
  • The Cost of Blood with Dr Jack Gann of the Thackray Museum of Medicine
  • A Climate of Truth with Professor Mike Berners-Lee
  • the ever popular, family oriented Science Fair
  • The Hidden Mathematics of Knitting with Alison Kiddle

You can find all the details here on the Festival 2025 page

On the other hand if you would like to jump straight to a page where you can buy tickets for the shows you can find it here.

Autumn thinking already ? !

June 2025 Science Café speakers

That was the summer (June) Science Café, but we can’t stop looking forwards to these coming autumnal days…

There will be another Science Café on 11th September and then it’s on to Science Festival week, November 9th – 15th. Our programme is now sorted and you’ll find the full details for the schools programme (for KS1 and KS2) here and for the rest of the Science Festival week (in full very shortly) here.

Keep in touch!

2025 Dates For Your Diary

We’re off with planning for this year’s Science Festival, so you can put the dates in your diary. We’re planning to begin with a family show on Sunday 9th November and close out with the Fair and our last speaker on Saturday 15th. In between will be our usual enticing selection of science based events and daytime schools shows for KS1 and KS2 pupils.

Full details will follow in due course.

Plus, of course, in the meantime there will be our regular Science Cafés currently scheduled for March 27th and June 26th, with one to follow in September, date tbc.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Festival 2024 is now behind us…

Another great range of events and a really popular Fair day. Thanks as ever to our presenters, stall holders and volunteers who made it possible. And, of course, thanks to everyone who came to join us. Here’s a small look back at some of the activities:

Lastly, I’m going to pick out one chart from Friday’s presentation “When Antarctica Was Green” by Dame Professor Jane Francis, Director of the British Antarctic Survey. It shows the results of using ice cores to directly see CO2 levels over the last 800,000 years (well beyond the arrival of homo sapiens).

At no time over those years was CO2 above 300ppm. It is now 422ppm. She said that in the past, when it was above 400ppm sea levels were 5-10m higher than they are now…

You can find more photos from this year and from past Festivals on our Flickr group at https://flic.kr/g/gvMsL