Year One.
10 October 2026.
TEDxGrantham is the first independently organised TED event held in Grantham, Lincolnshire. It takes place on Saturday 10 October 2026 from 1pm to 5pm at The King’s School, and is curated and produced by a small team of local volunteers under licence from TED.
Year One is small by design. A focused afternoon, a curated line-up of five speakers, a room close enough that ideas can become conversations before the day is out, and TED Talks video to anchor everything in the wider TED canon.
A small market town
with an outsized history of ideas.
Grantham is a market town in south Lincolnshire of around forty thousand people. It is the kind of place easy to drive through on the A1 without realising what it has produced. A young Isaac Newton sat in a classroom here and went on to reframe how the universe works. Margaret Thatcher grew up in a flat above her father’s grocery shop on North Parade and went on to reshape a country. Frederick Tuttle Townsend, the Grantham-born inventor, helped pioneer the early tank. A town this size does not, statistically, produce ideas of that magnitude. Grantham keeps doing it anyway.
TEDxGrantham exists to take that thread seriously. To say, out loud, that ideas worth spreading have a long history of coming from here, and to make space for the next ones.
The King’s School,
where Newton studied.
The King’s School in Grantham is one of the oldest schools in England, founded in 1329. Isaac Newton was a pupil here from 1655. We can think of no better room in which to bring ideas worth spreading back to Grantham than the one Newton walked into as a schoolboy.
Practical details, access information, and a map will be published here in the lead-up to the day.
One afternoon.
Five ideas.
Doors open at 1pm. The programme runs to 5pm, with a single curated line-up of five live speakers, TED Talks video chosen to sit alongside them, and a break built in for the conversations that always end up being half the point of a TEDx event.
Per the TEDx programme rules, our first edition is intentionally small. Future editions will grow once we have earned the room.
About TEDx
TEDx is a programme of local, self-organised events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TED Talks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection. The “x” in TEDx means “independently organised TED event”. TED provides general guidance and rules for the programme, but individual TEDx events are self-organised by local volunteers.
About TED
TED is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organisation dedicated to discovering, debating and spreading ideas that spark conversation, deepen understanding and drive meaningful change. It began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today it spans a worldwide network of initiatives including TED Talks, TED-Ed, the Audacious Project, TED Countdown, and TED Democracy.
Read more at ted.com/about/programs-initiatives, or follow TED on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.