Latest on the next Imaginarium event Thurs 12th Feb 2026 at Colchester’s Common Ground.
Following on from the first Wild Essex Imaginarium at UoE’s Essex Business School on Sept 27th 2025, we’re pleased to announce a further event on the evening of Thurs 12th Feb 2026 at Colchester’s Common Ground.
Our encounters with the neglected corners of urban decay, the rubble-strewn, derelict constructions, cracked concrete, and weed-infested edges, can sometimes feel like interruptions in the ordered experiences of city life. Yet this perturbing sense of uncontrollable, out-of-place, unsettled, and undesirable urban experience can often overlook broader modes of disturbance that function as forces, constantly transforming our environments, imaginations, and collective futures.
This free and open-to-all event invites you to consider concepts and practices of disturbance, not as unwelcome ruptures in predictable everyday urban experience, but as openings to something gainfully unintentional, unexpected, and perceptibly surprising.
Date: Thurs 12th Feb 2026
Time: 6.30–10pm
Venue: The Common Ground at the Minories https://www.commongroundcolchester.co.uk
Free entry. Registration
First draft programme
The Imaginarium Presents
Beth Chatto’s Meanwhile Garden: The Urban Wild & Other Disturbances
An Evening of Performance, Conversation & Ecology
6:30 – 6:50: Welcome Performance — Stuart Bowditch (Field Recordist, Artist, Musician): Homage to The Waiting Room
6:50 – 6:53: Welcome to Beth Chatto’s Meanwhile Garden & Essex Wildlife Trust, and Local Nature Recovery Strategy
6:53 – 7:03: Part One Introduction — Tony Sampson: The Imaginarium and Other Disturbances
7:03 – 7:18: Multimedia Performance — Elena Botts (Poet, Multimedia Artist, Musician and UoE Film PG Researcher): “some little works”
7:18 – 7:38: Artist Conversation — Elena Botts, Stuart Bowditch & Matt Shenton, with Tony Sampson
7:38 – 7:50: Audience Q&A + Opening of Food & Drink
7:50 – 8:25: Food, Drink & Performance — Matt Shenton (Experimental Musician, Sound Artist and Performer): “An Invitation to Disrupt“
8:25 – 8:45: The Science of Disturbance — Dhruti Bell & Kristina Chilver (UoE PG School of Life Sciences at the University of Essex Researchers)
8:45 – 8:55: Introduction to Session Two — David Gates: The Meanwhile Gardener
8:55 – 9:10: Talk — Darryl Moore: Landscape Garden Designer, Horticulture Writer & Photographer
9:10 – 9:25: Talk — John Little: Experimental Gardener
9:25 – 9:35: Audience Q&A
9:35 – 9:55: Closing Drinks + Performance — Stuart Bowditch & Matt Shenton
9:55: Event Ends
Beth Chatto’s Meanwhile Garden: The Urban Wild and Other Disturbances
Growing directly on the rubble of the old bus station (and latterly the much-loved “meanwhile” hacker/maker space, The Waiting Room), and designed to welcome both ornamental and spontaneous wild plants, the Meanwhile Garden offers a living case study of disturbance as creative practice. Located on an abandoned, low-nutrient brownfield site in Colchester city centre (behind the Minories and beside Firstsite), the garden’s ecology is part planned, part emergent, and maintained through community collaboration. It is where ecological disturbance can randomly occur and act as a catalyst that readies the ground for renewal.
This affirmative rendering of disturbance is not, however, limited to ecological thinking. In philosophy, disturbance can mark a conceptual threshold point where fixed ideas are interrupted by novel becomings and potentiality. Similarly, in the arts, disturbance is improvisation; it is aesthetic experimentation. Disturbance provides ways of perceiving that might slip beyond expectation, to become more than what is expected.
Beth Chatto’s Meanwhile Garden: The Urban Wild and Other Disturbances is an offshoot of the Wild Essex Imaginarium Project. Through talks, conversations, and various creative encounters, this free Faculty of the Imagination event explores how urban nature, community imagination, and creative practice can all draw on disturbance, disruption, interruption, and improvisation.
The Imaginarium presents speculative questions:
• What new ecologies arise when the city’s overlooked edges are left to express themselves?
• What possibilities emerge when we treat disturbance, not as a problem to be solved or tidied up, but as part of the design or creative process?
• What futures become possible when we stop asking how to avoid disturbance, and instead ask how to work with it?
• Ultimately, if disturbance opens an ecological space of possibility, how can it be expanded to open up new forms of collective environmental care, creativity, and imagination?
Links:
The first Imaginarium: https://culturalengine.org.uk/ongoing-coverage-of-the-first-wild-essex-imaginarium-27th-sept-2025-ebs-uoe/
Beth Chatto’s Meanwhile Garden: https://www.bethchatto.co.uk/discover/our-blog/guides/colchester-s-meanwhile-garden.htm
Meanwhile Leases: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/meanwhile-use-leases-and-guidance-for-landlords
The Waiting Room: https://www.st-botolphs.org/
More on The Waiting Room
Speaker and Performer Bios
Stuart Bowditch’s practice is located in places and communities that exist on the fringes, both geographically and socially, with a particular interest in the sonic landscape, capturing overlooked and overheard noises and using sound as a documentative and creative medium.’ https://www.stuartbowditch.co.uk/
Dhruti Bell has been working in the conservation and environmental engineering sectors, managing habitats as an RSPB warden and working on ecology, habitat creation, community engagement, and planning applications. She is currently a PhD student at the University of Essex researching the socioecological impacts of newly created versus long-term protected nature reserves.
Elena Botts is an artist and researcher at Essex who organizes a project loosely termed “unknown sound collective” intended as an archive of experimental artists’ interior worlds, these that are externalized through their work, and the interchange through artist communities around the world, and the social change this may or may not represent. “some little works”
Kristina Chilver is a PhD Researcher in Coastal Nature-based Solutions is a Marine Biology graduate and conservation ecologist from Colchester, Essex. With a background in ecological consultancy and coastal field research, her work focuses on nature-based solutions for ecosystem restoration and climate resilience. She is passionate about integrating science, policy, and community perspectives to protect coastal environments.
Matt Shenton is an experimental musician, sound artist and performer. He uses manipulated field recordings, scavenged objects and homemade instruments to explore absence in modern rural soundscapes.matthewshenton.co.uk
John Little has been reimagining what urban nature can be since founding the Grass Roof Company in 1998. Over the past 25+ years, John has designed and built more than 400 small green-roof structures and various other species-rich planting with walls engineered for nesting, hibernation, and year-round habitat.
Darryl Moore FRSA is an award winning garden and landscape designer. His diverse skillset and wide ranging knowledge base is formed from studies in Art History, Philosophy, Mechanical and Sound Design, along with a Post Graduate Diploma in Garden Design. Darryl is also an award winning garden and horticulture writer and garden photographer.
David Gates is the Meanwhile Gardener for the renowned Beth Chatto’s Plants and Gardens in Colchester, a project inspired by the legendary plantswoman Beth Chatto, known for her philosophy of “right plant, right place”. Gates leads the development of the “Meanwhile Garden” on a brownfield site, focusing on ecological design and community engagement, applying Chatto’s principles to create resilient, wildlife-friendly spaces from challenging urban environments.
