East London is wilder than you think. – Between the wetlands and the warehouses, the marshes and the megaprojects, something is happening to this city’s edges — ecologically, culturally, politically. Wild East London Imaginarium is a day-long public event that takes that seriously — and asks three questions: what does ‘wild’ mean in East London? Who gets to decide? And how do we build the conditions — political, cultural, and scientific — to get there?

This is not a conference. It is not a festival. It is a space where environmental scientists, artists, ecologists, activists, community organisers, writers, and researchers sit in the same room and work out what they actually think — about rewilding, about belonging, about what nature means in one of the most diverse and rapidly changing urban environments on earth.

Wild East London Imaginarium is a joint initiative of the Cultural Engine Research Group (UEL and University of Essex) and UEL’s Sustainability Research Institute — two research communities that between them span the creative, social, and environmental sciences, and share a belief that the most important questions don’t stay within silos.

It is also built into how CERG works. Alongside the big picture of national policy and the granular reality of neighbourhood experience, there is a mezzo level — and that is where CERG operates. It is the level between macro governance and micro community, where connections between stakeholders are actually forged, where institutions and publics meet, and where democratic accountability is either honoured or quietly abandoned. At a moment when the UK government is reorganising local government from the ground up, that middle ground has never been more important — or more precarious. Ensuring that environmental commitments survive the reorganisation, and that communities retain genuine voice within new structures, is part of what this event is for.

Wild East London Imaginarium builds on the Wild Essex Imaginarium (September 2025) and asks what comes next — for policy, for practice, for the places we share.

Come with questions. Come with expertise. Come with curiosity.