Charlotte Claussen
Published 26th June 2025
If you’re a regular TCUK attendee, you might have expected that TCUK would be at the end of September, perhaps early October. This was also the plan when we first started looking for venues and dates. However, we found out that we had good reasons to move the dates: Availability of venues and overlap with other conferences.
More conference venues are available and affordable in November
When we searched for venues, we found out that September and the beginning of October is peak conference season in the UK, and that makes conference venues more expensive. We were not aware of that at first; we just noticed that prices had gone up a lot since we were looking in 2023, and that only few suitable venues were available on the dates we were looking at.
Some might ask: “Why don’t you just raise the ticket prices?”. The answer to that is clear to us: We want to keep the ticket prices as low as we possibly can. We are volunteers who organise TCUK to support our community, and this includes professionals who don’t have a big company training budget. We believe that we’re only supporting everyone if we do our best to keep costs down and to provide the best possible value for our members and the wider community.
Others might ask: “Why don’t you just lower your expectations to the venue?”. To this the answer is just as clear: We’re very picky about the venue, as we believe it really sets the scene for the unique community vibe of TCUK. See James Bartley’s considerations when choosing a venue for TCUK25.
We avoid overlap with other conferences
In the TCUK team, we don’t see ourselves as competitors to other event organisers. Rather, we see our conference as a unique and complementary addition to the other events in our field. The conference scene has changed since before the pandemic, so we took a closer look to see where we fit in.
To avoid overlap with conferences that our members might want to join, we looked at what other events were announced throughout the year. We also interacted with people from other organisations to hear if they had plans that were not yet made public. We learned that November dates are better for avoiding overlap with the most relevant other conferences–not just in 2025, but in general. That’s why we decided to have TCUK25 in November.
Take part in TCUK25
The call for proposals is open. Find full details under the Call for Proposals section of the TCUK page.