Let Water be Water

The original universal language...

Water has always been more than a resource. It has shaped where cities are built and how they grow, drawn communities to its edges, and inspired creatives for millennia. Around 60% of the human body is water; 71% of the planet's surface too. And yet only 0.5% of it is freshwater accessible to us, and the UN estimates that around four billion people — close to half the world's population — experience severe water scarcity for at least one month every year. The most universal substance we share is also one of the most unequally distributed.

Water is the original universal language. Settlements followed rivers. Half of the world's largest cities sit on coasts. In 2017, New Zealand's Whanganui River was recognised as a legal person — the first in the world — codifying what Māori communities have always known: I am the river and the river is me.

This month, World Ocean Day, Climate Action Week and Oceanographic's newly launched Innerview have pulled attention back to the scale of what water asks of us. The recent heatwave has done the same closer to home: lower reservoirs, hosepipe bans, harder conversations about flood defences and drought.

A conversation with engineering colleagues has stuck with us. The shift in their world is toward what they describe as letting water be water — designing with it rather than against it. Sponge cities, restored floodplains, daylighted streams (like London's Quaggy and Effra brought back up into the light). Less concrete, more give. For those of us in public art, cultural strategy and the built environment, it's a shift full of opportunity.

That opportunity is shaping a lot of our year. We've been talking with the Joint Thames Partnership about how London communities can be brought closer to the river through cultural programming, alongside the brilliant work already delivered by the Thames Festival Trust. And as members of the Ocean Rising Alliance — a global network of creatives, scientists and cultural organisations making the ocean central to how we tell the climate story — we're increasingly conscious that ocean health begins far upstream. What happens in a London street drain matters to a reef. Cities and urban communities need to feel connected to water they can't see, and to seas they may rarely visit.

The data can be numbing. The scale is daunting. That's where creatives come in — translating hard information into something people can walk through, take part in, and carry home. Chanel's new 'cruise' collection, Waterlines art exhibition, Choked 2.0 dance performance, The Innerview magazine, the Rivers Trust and WaterAid... Different disciplines, the same instinct: making water something we can feel.

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In praise of pause

by Lucy Bawden • 28 August 2026

August has that quality of the year holding its breath... Diaries thin out, inboxes slow, and even London, usually so relentless, has felt noticeably quieter this month. For a lot of us, August is when we swap the working city for somewhere slower. The countryside, the coast, a rented house in the middle of nowhere. The French have a phrase for it, la fermeture annuelle, which appears every August on the shuttered fronts of bakeries and butchers from Paris to Marseille. A whole society agreeing, more or less at the same time, to stop. Nobody thinks it strange. Nobody starves. The bakery reopens in September and everybody carries on. I've noticed recently how a break, often an enforced one, tends to turn out to be the best way forward. A project timeline that extends, a friend on gardening leave, a decision-maker unreachable for two weeks. Not dramatic full stops, and not doing-nothing time either, just the quieter workaday version of pause: the deliberate, small, well-placed kind that lets everything around it work better. I met a lawyer once who told me his real job was problem-solving, and that to do it properly he needed serious research time, which was really, he admitted, staring-out-of-the-window time. Billed at £400 an hour and quietly the most valuable thing he did all day. He is probably one of the better lawyers I've met... There's a version of this that runs through cultural strategy and the built environment: the strategic pause, the moment between phases where a client stops, looks around, and asks what did we actually learn from that? Placemakers and public artists have their own word for it, dwell time, the measure of whether a space actually invites people to stop, sit and linger. Fred Kent and the Project for Public Spaces school built the modern practice around it. A new generation of AI companions like Dwel are now measuring it in real time. Different words, same idea. A place that earns dwell time is a place that's working. Artists know all this more than most as a creative practice depends on breathing room, the empty hours and the walking that eventually becomes an idea. It's why most artists have some form of sketchbook, and why the best of them fill it with studies, notes and half-thoughts long before they touch a canvas. The sketchbook is the pause, the working-through, the aligning of thought before action. And it's occurred to us lately that play and pause, which we tend to talk about as opposites, are really the same thing wearing different clothes. Play is often a form of rest. Pause, done properly, is the moment the mind wanders and, in the wandering, starts to play. August is when much of our own pause work happens. Reviewing projects, catching up with associates, shaping the strategic and fundraising priorities that will carry the year through. If you're planning a cultural strategy, public art commission or placemaking programme for the last quarter or for 2027, or if you're at a project pause point and wondering how to make the most of it, we'd love to hear from you. Pause isn't a break from the work. Very often, it's where the work actually starts.

Summertime, Playtime

29 July 2026

Play as method, play as place... Play has been the word we keep coming back to over the last few months. It's surfaced in projects, in conversations with clients, in strategic notes and in end-of-day debriefs — a small, deceptively simple word doing a surprising amount of work. Part of why it keeps working so hard is that it means something different to everyone. For one person, play is a football game win. For another, it's a quiet hour with a book, a festival crowd, a pop-up exhibition in a public square, a five-year-old and a stick. It stretches across ages, disciplines and moods. Not just play in the obvious sense — the infrastructure of it, in playgrounds, sports courts, concert halls and public realm. And not only play in culture — the festivals, gigs, community moments and shared experiences that give places their identity. But also play as a method — the space and time to experiment, make mistakes, try things without needing to know where they'll land. And, quietly underneath all of it, play as a way of exploring and discovering — new ideas, new places, new relationships. Getting to know a city we've never visited. Getting to know a person we've just met. Trying an approach at work we haven't tried before. Exploring, making, testing, imagining, discovering. Ingrained human needs, all of them. And all of them, in the end, come back to that one simple word. There's a growing body of thinking that treats play as serious infrastructure. Arup's Urban Play Framework, produced with the LEGO Foundation and the Royal Town Planning Institute, argues that play should be considered alongside transport, energy and housing as something cities plan for, not around. The playable cities movement — public art, interactive interventions, temporary experiments — has been quietly reshaping how councils and developers think about the public realm; think Playful Anywhere's roving Playbox in Leeds, or the interactive commissions of the Playable City network in Bristol. And in cultural strategy, the phrase we hear most often now is test and iterate: try a pop-up before committing to a permanent programme, prototype a space before building it out. That's play too. Just in corporate speak:) We see it particularly in our own work. The best cultural strategies we've been part of have all had a playful stage — early conversations where nothing is fixed, where a client is willing to sit with several possible futures before choosing one. The best public art commissions carry that instinct all the way through delivery: room for the artist to respond to the site, room for the audience to bring their own reading. Places don't work unless people can play in them. Places don't feel alive unless something is being tried. This month — with Wimbledon just ending, festival season everywhere, and the year at its most sociable — play feels particularly present. A tennis rally is play. A festival crowd is play. A board game after dinner is play. Travelling somewhere new is play. Each is a version of the same underlying instinct: to experiment, to move, to see what happens when we do something together. Work hard. Play harder. But maybe, mostly, remember that the two aren't as separate as we think!