REconnecting through art and nature.

A Common Language

Nature has always run through our work. Outdoor festivals on riverbanks and in woodlands, art in public squares, and — back in 2012 — joining the Chelsea Fringe steering committee as it launched. The Fringe was a deliberately scrappy alternative to the Chelsea Flower Show: pop-up gardens on power station forecourts, guerrilla planting, evenings among the bees at Lambeth Palace, a floating park on the Grand Union Canal. The point wasn't to compete with the RHS. It was to gather people around the wilder, more curious horticulture happening across London — and to let plants do what they so often quietly do: bring strangers into conversation with each other.

Nearly fifteen years on, that instinct still shapes a lot of what we do. Not because we set out to be a "green" agency, but because the projects we love most almost always lead us back to the same territory: the seam between nature and culture, and what becomes possible when the two are allowed to talk to each other.

This month, that thread is everywhere. Chelsea in Bloom (18–24 May) turns 21 with its 'Out of this World' theme. More than 145 Chelsea businesses transforming their frontages with floral dragons, UFOs and constellations across Sloane Square, the King's Road and Pavilion Road. Free, ambitious, joyful — and now a fixture of the season. Like the best festivals, it works because nobody needs a translation. Flowers speak.

Across the Channel, where we spend much of our year, the Villes et Villages Fleuris programme has been doing similar work, more quietly, since 1959. Nearly 4,700 French communes carry the label, awarded for their commitment to plant life, biodiversity and the quality of shared space. Over the decades the criteria have shifted — away from showy bedding, toward perennial planting, native species, ecological care, and community involvement. Communities, in other words, learning to garden with nature rather than against it.

That shift feels important. It's a small example of something bigger happening across the work we follow: a move away from the idea that nature is something to be controlled, and toward the idea that it's a collaborator. Nature, of course, always finds a way — a crack in the pavement, a self-seeded rose, a fox curled up in a city garden, a river quietly insisting on its old course. It's probably the most creative force we have. The question increasingly isn't how we hold it back, but how we embrace it, work alongside it, and let some of its creativity into our own.

We see this in the work of creatives too. Proposition Studios brings creatives, scientists and ecologists into conversation around the human as part of ecology — their recent exhibition After Nature a lovely example of work made with place rather than just about it.

The Wilderness Art Collective gathers painters, sculptors, filmmakers, designers and writers around our relationship with landscape and what creative work can do to help us care; their shows — Landlines, Wilderness for the Mind, Waterlines — have a way of slowing audiences down and asking them to notice. And in Devon, the Sharpham Trust is rewilding 550 acres on the banks of the River Dart alongside an arts and retreats programme — getting out of the way, beautifully, and letting the land remember itself.

What ties all of this together, for us, is a refusal to treat nature as backdrop — and an openness to what happens when we stop fighting it. Whether it's a Chelsea shopfront, a labelled French village, an exhibition in a rewilded gallery, a coastline drawn in ink, or an estuary near the South Hams, the most interesting work right now is happening where nature and culture sit alongside each other, doing their work together. Both, in their own way, are universal languages. Both have a remarkable capacity to bring strangers together — into the same street, the same conversation.

It's a conversation we love being part of. So if you can this month: go and see something growing. Walk a Chelsea in Bloom route. Notice a Ville Fleurie sign at the edge of a village. Sit by an oak tree for ten quiet minutes.

The reconnection — to nature, to each other, to where we live — is small, repeatable, and surprisingly powerful.

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Curioser and curioser...

by Lucy Bawden • 22 September 2026

September alway has that back-to-school vibe and we love the fresh notebooks, and sharper pencils. A new academic year starting somewhere, even if you're nowhere near a school! This month that makes it easy to remember something a lot of us forget in the middle of the working year: that the most valuable habit in any professional practice, ours included, is curiosity. My husband recently, and (unknowingly) generously, compared me to Hermione Granger... It landed better than intended probably because one of my favourite things about the Harry Potter books is their underlying argument that it doesn't really matter who your parents were, or which school you went to... What matters is whether you stay curious enough, and work hard enough, to keep learning. The greatest witches and wizards, it turns out, are the ones who never assume they've finished their homework! This applies unnervingly well to the built environment... The developers, clients and consultants we most enjoy working with all share the same underlying quality. Not necessarily the smartest in the room, not the most experienced, not the ones with the biggest portfolios — the ones interested in learning and building a team who know more than they do. The ones who arrive on a new site and want to know what it used to be, who lives around it now, what's already working there, and what the place itself might be trying to tell them. The ones who ask questions before arriving with answers. Listening, of course, is inseparable from it — and one of our own core values. Curiosity without listening is just performance. Some of the best insights we've helped surface on projects have come not from workshops or strategy documents, but from the quiet conversations at the edges: the property managers who knows why the north side of the building is never used, the neighbour who's walked past the site for thirty years, the marketing lead who mentions the thing they've never quite said out loud. Curious people listen. Learners listen more. That instinct becomes especially valuable when heritage is involved. Heritage is too often treated as a constraint to be negotiated with — a listing designation, a consultee to be handled, a set of red lines. In the projects that go best, we've found, heritage is treated as an asset rather than a fear: not something to circumvent, but something to understand, and — in the understanding — to draw richer meaning and richer value from. The historic layer becomes part of what a new development is for, not something it has to work around. This idea of layers and connection goes further... People protect what they value, and they value what they understand and feel connected to... This is where the arts, artists and cultural programming can be so invaluable in helping people notice, understand and form the kind of relationship with a place that turns another development into our neighbourhood. At a moment when climate resilience, biodiversity and community cohesion are all in the same conversation, that's not decoration. It's fundamental to whether a place is loved enough to be looked after — by residents, by owners, by future generations. Curiosity as a professional practice needs feeding, and that's where research, libraries, conferences and talks quietly earn their keep. We've been deep in preparation this month for our talk at October's Healthy City Design Congress in Salford (20–22 October) — a good reminder that our projects always land better when we make proper time to learn, not only to deliver. If you're planning autumn or 2027 work — a cultural strategy, a public art commission, a heritage-led placemaking programme, or a site with layers you'd like to understand better — we'd love to hear from you. And if you're at HCD2026, come and find us! Curiosity, it turns out, isn't a soft skill. It's the whole game.

In praise of pause

by Lucy Bawden • 28 August 2026

August has that quality of the year holding its breath... Diaries thin out, inboxes slow, and even London, usually so relentless, has felt noticeably quieter this month. For a lot of us, August is when we swap the working city for somewhere slower. The countryside, the coast, a rented house in the middle of nowhere. The French have a phrase for it, la fermeture annuelle, which appears every August on the shuttered fronts of bakeries and butchers from Paris to Marseille. A whole society agreeing, more or less at the same time, to stop. Nobody thinks it strange. Nobody starves. The bakery reopens in September and everybody carries on. I've noticed recently how a break, often an enforced one, tends to turn out to be the best way forward. A project timeline that extends, a friend on gardening leave, a decision-maker unreachable for two weeks. Not dramatic full stops, and not doing-nothing time either, just the quieter workaday version of pause: the deliberate, small, well-placed kind that lets everything around it work better. I met a lawyer once who told me his real job was problem-solving, and that to do it properly he needed serious research time, which was really, he admitted, staring-out-of-the-window time. Billed at £400 an hour and quietly the most valuable thing he did all day. He is probably one of the better lawyers I've met... There's a version of this that runs through cultural strategy and the built environment: the strategic pause, the moment between phases where a client stops, looks around, and asks what did we actually learn from that? Placemakers and public artists have their own word for it, dwell time, the measure of whether a space actually invites people to stop, sit and linger. Fred Kent and the Project for Public Spaces school built the modern practice around it. A new generation of AI companions like Dwel are now measuring it in real time. Different words, same idea. A place that earns dwell time is a place that's working. Artists know all this more than most as a creative practice depends on breathing room, the empty hours and the walking that eventually becomes an idea. It's why most artists have some form of sketchbook, and why the best of them fill it with studies, notes and half-thoughts long before they touch a canvas. The sketchbook is the pause, the working-through, the aligning of thought before action. And it's occurred to us lately that play and pause, which we tend to talk about as opposites, are really the same thing wearing different clothes. Play is often a form of rest. Pause, done properly, is the moment the mind wanders and, in the wandering, starts to play. August is when much of our own pause work happens. Reviewing projects, catching up with associates, shaping the strategic and fundraising priorities that will carry the year through. If you're planning a cultural strategy, public art commission or placemaking programme for the last quarter or for 2027, or if you're at a project pause point and wondering how to make the most of it, we'd love to hear from you. Pause isn't a break from the work. Very often, it's where the work actually starts.

Summertime, Playtime

29 July 2026

Play as method, play as place... Play has been the word we keep coming back to over the last few months. It's surfaced in projects, in conversations with clients, in strategic notes and in end-of-day debriefs — a small, deceptively simple word doing a surprising amount of work. Part of why it keeps working so hard is that it means something different to everyone. For one person, play is a football game win. For another, it's a quiet hour with a book, a festival crowd, a pop-up exhibition in a public square, a five-year-old and a stick. It stretches across ages, disciplines and moods. Not just play in the obvious sense — the infrastructure of it, in playgrounds, sports courts, concert halls and public realm. And not only play in culture — the festivals, gigs, community moments and shared experiences that give places their identity. But also play as a method — the space and time to experiment, make mistakes, try things without needing to know where they'll land. And, quietly underneath all of it, play as a way of exploring and discovering — new ideas, new places, new relationships. Getting to know a city we've never visited. Getting to know a person we've just met. Trying an approach at work we haven't tried before. Exploring, making, testing, imagining, discovering. Ingrained human needs, all of them. And all of them, in the end, come back to that one simple word. There's a growing body of thinking that treats play as serious infrastructure. Arup's Urban Play Framework, produced with the LEGO Foundation and the Royal Town Planning Institute, argues that play should be considered alongside transport, energy and housing as something cities plan for, not around. The playable cities movement — public art, interactive interventions, temporary experiments — has been quietly reshaping how councils and developers think about the public realm; think Playful Anywhere's roving Playbox in Leeds, or the interactive commissions of the Playable City network in Bristol. And in cultural strategy, the phrase we hear most often now is test and iterate: try a pop-up before committing to a permanent programme, prototype a space before building it out. That's play too. Just in corporate speak:) We see it particularly in our own work. The best cultural strategies we've been part of have all had a playful stage — early conversations where nothing is fixed, where a client is willing to sit with several possible futures before choosing one. The best public art commissions carry that instinct all the way through delivery: room for the artist to respond to the site, room for the audience to bring their own reading. Places don't work unless people can play in them. Places don't feel alive unless something is being tried. This month — with Wimbledon just ending, festival season everywhere, and the year at its most sociable — play feels particularly present. A tennis rally is play. A festival crowd is play. A board game after dinner is play. Travelling somewhere new is play. Each is a version of the same underlying instinct: to experiment, to move, to see what happens when we do something together. Work hard. Play harder. But maybe, mostly, remember that the two aren't as separate as we think!