The draw.
Our instruments and apparatus are built to be played with and enjoyed by every visitor who walks past them, but underneath the hood they are designed for the families who find your busiest days too much, and who are an audience you may not be fully reaching at the moment.
It isn’t a separate ticketed attraction, it sits inside your normal admission, and it gives a family a reason to come on an ordinary Tuesday and another reason to come back when the instruments rotate.
We can accommodate pop-up, semi-fixed on a rotation of equipment, or build a permanent feature.
Three things come with it.
- Additional footfall, and visitors staying longer once they’re in
- Secondary spend
- Reach: a demonstrable accessibility offer you can put in your own accessibility statement, your funding bids and your annual report.
A school, nursery or respite setting? The outdoor sensory space has a page of its own for you.
Everything is made to be played with.
Everything in the garden is designed to be interacted with. A sculpture catches the sunlight and scatters a palette of beautiful colours across the grass. Every instrument is tuned to the same musical key and always stays in tune, so nothing anyone plays can clash with anything else, and there is no wrong note and no wrong way to play.
Nobody is herded along. A visitor can stay at one instrument, drift between them, or sit at the edge and let it settle around them, and because everyone’s input weaves into the same shared soundscape, strangers of different ages end up making something together without a word needing to be exchanged.
We interweave our apparatus into your space so that it never visually imposes or dominates. Revealing and complementing your grounds, we make sure your space keeps its character and tone.
The official side of access.
The Equality Act 2010 gives service providers an anticipatory duty: you’re required to think about disabled visitors’ access in advance, not just respond when someone asks. Funders look for the same thing, and National Lottery Heritage Fund grants carry a mandatory inclusion outcome while Arts Council England funding agreements ask for evidenced progress on access.
Hosting our outdoor sensory spaces is a concrete way to answer all of that and to boost your revenue along with it.
How it might look: a late morning in the arboretum.
A Tuesday in late June, mid-morning. A grandmother and two children come through the gate with no plan beyond a walk, and ten minutes in they find the first instruments beside the path. The younger one moves a lever and watches colour wheels move, the older one has found the chimes, and because everything is tuned to the same key, whatever they strike sounds like it was meant to happen. A couple a little further along join in from the next instrument and make a call-and-response musical communication without a word being exchanged.
Three ways it can live with you.
Pop-up. We set up for a few days or a season, deliver the experience, and remove it without a trace.
Rotating. The core stays and the instruments refresh on a rolling basis, so there’s always a reason to come back, and the favourites remain.
Permanent. A dedicated outdoor sensory space, built into your grounds, yours for every season.
We work to your space and your budget, from a clearing beside a path to a dedicated corner of the grounds. Quieter, tailored sessions outside public hours are available too, and school visits to your site are part of the offer. After dark the same grounds can host a separate ticketed evening — see Evening Installations. The design thinking behind all of it is set out in how we design the outdoor sensory spaces.