Grand Designs LIVE at the ExCel Centre

In a world where language is often used carelessly and inaccurately, Grand Designs LIVE, running at the ExCeL Centre until May 4, delivers on the promise of every word.

The plurality of designs being showcased cannot be exaggerated; from kitchens and glassware to fountains and solar panels, from prints by Banksy to massive outdoor beanbags, everything that you could think to put in your house or garden is there in numbers.

Grandness is present in the sheer scale of the ExCeL centre which has dedicated several football stadiums worth of space to this exhibit. The ceilings are so high that a medium sized dinosaur could wander round without fear of grazing it’s reptilean head.

Grandness also comes in the form of imagination.  House of the Future offers a series of technology-wired furniture items such as the white chrome ‘napshell’ fitted with sound and light therapy to provide the ultimate in soothing power naps. Then there is the £4,000 tap by Pure H20. Depending on which of the four buttons you press, either hot, sparkling, cold or room temperature, water comes gushing out. Whatever you select has been passed through a reverse osmosis water filter making it purer than pure at 10 ppm (part per million – to contrast, Thames Water is 500 ppm).

Then there is the LIVE aspect. Various speeches, demonstrations and debates (e.g. classicism vs modernism) are a daily event often given by interior decorators, gardeners and cooks who front the consumer shows that the public so loves to devour. Celebrity chefs deliver edible demonstrations in a kitchen equipped with everything from a massive circular tabletop that is actually a chopping board and a nifty electronic smoke diffuser that rises from the back of the cooker like a rather slow, automated Loch Ness monster.

You can walk  for an hour without seeing the same stall twice and the whole experience calls to mind a giant, indoor version of an Eastern market. However, whereas in India or Thailand the layered sound of stall owners alternately charming and heckling you into buying their wares is standard, here an eerie silence prevails. Only after I had stood observing some intriguing art for five minutes did a young lady artist step forward and politely ask if I might want her card.

The peace  conceals all kinds of surprises, such as climate change secretary Ed Miliband and DJ Doctor Fox, at  an event which covers all possible ground in its remit.

Grand Designs LIVE runs until Monday 4 May at the ExCeL Centre:

One Western Gateway
Royal Victoria Dock
Newham
E16 1XL

www.granddesignslive.com