Through public Live Action Role-Play (LARP), workshops, exhibitions, meetups, and conversations, you are invited to explore new ways of seeing, being, and belonging in coastal communities. Dive into a year of activities – playful encounters, fun gatherings, creative connections, community talent-and-passion-sharing, artistic opportunities, and engaging conversations on the issues that matter.
Everyone is welcome. Our events are free, friendly, and designed so anyone – whatever your background or experience – can take part comfortably.
Since May 2024, Furtherfield has been hosting playful encounters to explore what really matters to the community. Looking back over 150 years of change and dreaming of new possibilities for all (people and all living beings) – creating proposals for a Felixstowe that is cared for, celebrated, and thriving.
Reimagine This Coastal Town builds on this year of playful activities and builds on the priorities of the local people who joined us:
These priorities are not fixed but will adapt to the things we discover as the programme unfolds.
Reimagine This Coastal Town is an 18 month project running from April 2025 to September 2026. It includes a programme of events, workshops, an exhibition, and a series of time-travelling events in a form of immersive fiction called Live Action Role Play (LARP). The programme is co-produced for all, by young adults (18-30) and eight creative practitioners from the region. Together these lead to new community-led visions for the future of the town.
We want to
🌿 Care for Felixstowe – spark a town-wide conversation about what it means for Felixstowe to be cared for, celebrated, and thriving.
👥 Connect Generations Through Change – bring together people of all ages and backgrounds to share real stories of courage, creativity, nature-connection and resilience.
✨Celebrate Local Creativity – work and dream better together. Celebrate the imagination, talent, and cooperation that make Felixstowe unique.
🐚 Reconnect with Nature – strengthen our bonds with the land, sea, and all living beings – treating other beings as co-creators in a thriving community.
🌞 Imagine the Futures We Want – spark curiosity and pride in Felixstowe’s possible futures. Change is coming – what do we want to sustain?
The LARP events were co-devised by Ruth Catlow (Furtherfield) and Ann Light (University of Sussex), with Mimi Doncaster, Frazer Merrick, and Kirsty Tallent. Thanks to Cuppa for hosting the community conversation that inspired and informed our work, and to Hamilton MAS for hosting our co-creation workshops and our exhibition. Elly Clarke will be co-curating the 2026 program and the Felixstowe Youth Co-Production Team includes Courtney Hessey (26) and Stanley Willey (25) who are offering guidance on youth empowerment and creating and facilitating a wider range of methods for outreach. Thanks to the Felixstowe Community Nature Reserve & Citizen Science Group as well as the team from Landguard Nature Reserve for their knowledge and expertise on the local wildlife and biodiversity. Finally a big thank you to the hundreds of people (so far) who have joined us to shape the experience.
Since 1996, Furtherfield has organised for inclusivity and equity in art and technology. Since 2008, we have promoted their use in shaping real social change and positive environmental impact.
In 2024, after extensive research, dialogue, and collaboration with local and regional communities, Furtherfield, part of Arts Council England National Portfolio of Organisations, relocated from London’s Finsbury Park to Felixstowe, East Suffolk, with a renewed place-based mission.
We believe that imagining the possible futures of the places we care about is the first step toward creating the ones we want. And that the long-term wellbeing of ALL beings is the business of us all.
A proven way of generating visionary new worlds, we are using LARP (Live Action Role Play), a form of game where participants play characters who interact to pursue goals within a fictional setting. This kind of immersive fiction and role-play inspires community-led environmental and social transformation in Felixstowe, enabling residents to collectively reimagine its future in the context of social and environmental change, with a particular focus on youth empowerment and reaching those communities in the town that might not always feel that arts are for them.
This project is realised in partnership with The University of Sussex, Level Two Youth Projects, Hamilton MAS, and the Felixstowe Citizen Science Group and with support from Arts Council England and the Suffolk Cultural Fund.
Becoming ‘Boro is inviting people to explore the part they play in Middlesbrough’s shifting identity and potential futures. A place-based, live action role-play (LARP) – will be the first event of its type in Teesside and will all be grounded in local history, present tensions, and eco-social possibilities.
Booking is now open on Eventbrite
Becoming ’Boro, is an immersive, research-centred LARP invites people to step into a future Middlesbrough and imagine how their town’s identity could transform in years to come. The game-like experience supports players to explore
Two sets of ‘power objects’ allow people to imagine time-travelling together, exploring ideas, discovering fresh perspectives, and rehearsing meaningful change,
This is a chance to co-create new possibilities, together. No experience required, just bring your curiosity and willingness to play.
There are multiple free sessions throughout the festival. The publicly bookable sessions for the LARP will be:
Becoming ‘Boro has been developed by artists Ruth Catlow and Cecilia Wee at Furtherfield, with Middlesbrough artists, residents, community organisers and civic collaborators. Design by Sofia Barton. Presented at Middlesbrough Art Week, 2025, supported by Borderlands.
An immersive experience to help small coastal settlements adjust to likely futures in the most positive way
With a global lack of leadership on environmental issues, many people feel they are not ready for what the future may bring and are seeking means to come together to face approaching uncertainties. They might feel that the big issues of our time are not their business, but want to influence what happens round them.
This Coastal Town is a 2-hour live action role play (larp) workshop devised by Ruth Catlow and Ann Light to help address this gap between the global and the things we can (and would be prepared to) do in coastal towns we care about: to encourage people in a neighbourhood to find each other and devise ways of managing issues that stem from their varied social and ecological interests and concerns.
Larps are events designed to spark imagination and action through collaboration. Role play, improvisation and critical thinking collide, enabling people to explore the “What ifs” about any situation, from the probable to the very unusual, and “rehearse” the outcomes they would like to see.
To learn more watch this short film by Hydar Dewachi, 2024. (10 minutes)
Initial success has led to a broader ambition: to take the techniques devised and offer them for other contexts, as well as transforming early imaginings into both real-world and fictional visions of thriving eco-social communities in Felixstowe.
These events are devised as part of an ongoing art-action-research loop that builds on years of collaboration between Ann Light and Ruth Catlow, and creative practice and research inspired by communities of experimental artists and designers working with eco-social change. These are some of the papers that study and theorise how and why this experience works.
We gathered feedback as part of developing the larp, but also encouraged people to take time at the end of each session to reflect on what was learnt and what townsfolk might do (or do differently) in considering their futures and that of those around them and other living things. We give a few of the many comments we received:
It’s important to use our imaginations to create the futures we want
“It just reminds us that we have to bring our creative imaginations to the future that we want. – It’s playful, it’s going to make a lot of people think, it’s going to surprise a lot of people” – Adrian
This experience made it more fun and less worrying to exploring the future
“It brings up serious issues while you are allowed to have a bit of fun with them. But also in a way allowing you to disassociate so your prime self doesn’t have to worry about them, because it’s this future self” – Mark
It’s important to respect ideas and feelings of young people in this town
“It’s great to involve younger people who don’t always get involved in these conversations because we feel a bit disenfranchised, and we feel a little bit pushed out by the older generation sometimes. In Felixstowe, it seems to be an older population…we are trying to get a place for younger people to be collectively together and work with you guys so we can make something we are ALL proud of. It’s just great to have a platform to be able to share ideas and feelings about Felixstowe and have them listened to and respected by everybody.” – Courtney
At heart, this is a live action role-play (larp) exercise giving the chance for people to leap into the future of their area, speak as different generations and work successfully on issues that concern them. By setting the action in the future, participants reflect on how some of the challenges they predict can be tackled and even solved. Themes emerge through groups of townsfolk meeting together in conversation. This experience has been developed to raise difficult issues supportively and in such a way that people feel stronger and more connected, rather than anxious or powerless. It was devised as “hyperlocal eco-social” place-making: that is to say, people living in the same neighbourhood are understood to share some social and ecological concerns related to their environment and need something around which to gather and move from individual worry to co-created action.
It is also designed to help people recognise how local systems are interdependent, relying on the plants, animals, institutions and places that make up the area, just as the major global systems, such as weather, climate and geography, work together to affect what happens. This understanding is part of supporting readiness, because changes in these relationships are part of what we are all experiencing and have to deal with.
This Coastal Town was created by Ruth Catlow and director of arts organisation Furtherfield, which has been establishing itself in Felixstowe, a town of about 24,000 people, and Ann Light, an academic at the University of Sussex wanting to learn how creative participatory and immersive practices can support people in a locality to be ready for the increasingly uncertain futures ahead. Devised in 3 stages, Ann and Ruth first invited Felixstowe residents and visitors to chat about the futures they wanted in May 2024. In July 2024 they shared what they discovered with three creative practitioners from the region: Mimi Doncaster and Frazer Merrick, and Kirsty Tallent. Together they created an immersive future fiction that formed the basis of This Coastal Town, a public “time-travelling” event to work on the future together. This larp was first held in Felixstowe in September 2024, then further developed with local youth empowerment consultants Courtney Hessey and Lauren Bruen, for a second Felixstowe iteration in Spring 2025. Ann and Ruth worked on a version that could travel, and events were also held in May 2025, in partnership with First Light Festival’s Battery of Ideas in Lowestoft and Hospitable Environments in Newhaven. These events have supported preparation for the creation of the playbook.
This Coastal Town is made possible by partnership with The University of Sussex, and is part of Reimagine This Coastal Town supported by Level Two Youth Projects, Hamilton MAS, and the Felixstowe Citizen Science Group and with support from Arts Council England and the Suffolk Cultural Fund and the Arts and Humanities Research Council, grant no AH/Y003330/1.
Businesses, governments and citizens all have a role to play in supporting urban biodiversity. How might digital technology help? And how can we design more-than-human smart cities in practice and policy, and in ways that work for citizens?
Mosaic is a four-year programme of collaborative, interdisciplinary, and cross-sectoral research and innovation that will deliver a step‑change in how we design, plan and build our cities for thriving multispecies cohabitation.
Funded with a £1.6 million investment through a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship awarded to Dr Sara Heitlinger, the research is investigating large‑scale transformation of smart cities from a human-centered perspective, to a more‑than‑human one. A more‑than‑human perspective of cities is one that acknowledges and designs for the interrelations between humans and non‑human others – including plants, animals, bacteria, as well as water, air and sensors – in urban space.
Furtherfield is collaborating to develop innovative and interdisciplinary methods such as multispecies Live Action Roleplay to decenter the human. These methods help to reveal values, needs and challenges in place-based communities which will inform how we design and plan more-than-human smart cities.
You can watch this video to get a sense of how it works.
Visit the Mosaic website to learn more about this project.
Furtherfield content is published
