More details on the next Imaginarium event early next year
Following on from the first Wild Essex Imaginarium at UoE’s Essex Business School on Sept 27th, we’re pleased to announce a further event on the evening of Thurs 12th Feb 2026 at Colchester’s Common Ground.
The event will present a fascinating programme of talks and performances engaging with different modes of disturbance including Beth Chatto’s Meanwhile Garden project.
For now, here’s the latest event information, draft programme, and the initial conceptual framing for the discussion.
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
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: Introduction — Tony Sampson: The Imaginarium and Other Disturbance
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
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
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.
The Meanwhile Garden
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