The Walking Forest – Festival of Nature 2023
Saturday 17 June
The Walking Forest will arrive on the streets of Bristol for the day! Join our pop-up sensory forest performances as it strolls through Bristol Centre. A comic forest inhabitant will invite you to bask in the shelter of our trees to do nature crafts & listen to forest stories at stopping places in Broadmead, Bristol’s Old City & King Street. Enable the Walking Forest to live on by taking one of our free trees home to plant in your garden or favourite community space.
Bristol has set a target to double the city’s tree canopy by 2050, as well as the city’s wildlife by the same date. The Walking Forest will invite visitors to imagine Bristol’s streets with more tree cover, and spark conversations about the changes that might be needed for our built environment to create enough spaces for trees in the city.
Local artists Dee Moxon, Ruth Ramsay, Michael Loader and Slater will inspire audiences to explore different zones of the forest including the canopy, undergrowth and forest floor - all on the streets of Bristol’s city centre. Tree experts will be on hand to share more information about Bristol’s ambitions, and how residents can get involved.
Pop-up performances will take place in in Broadmead (10:00 - 11:15am), in Old City (11:45 - 1:30) and on King Street (2:30 - 4pm).
Audiences will encounter volunteers becoming “walking trees” and will have the chance to join in with free family activities and hands-on forestry crafts. With 500 fruit trees to giveaway, visitors to the city centre will be invited to join the walking forest by taking a free fruit tree home or to a community space.
Follow our walking forest throughout the day on @festofnature
For any media enquiries contact Izzy at izzy@bnhc.org.uk
Photography & Video on the day
Please be aware that media (including video, photos or audio) may be collected at this event. If you do not wish to be included, please stand aside and/or make yourself known to the photographer or videographer. Media collected at the event will only be used in relevant communications by the Bristol City Council and The Natural History Consortium.
Acknowledgments
This cultural project has been created by The Natural History Consortium, the charity behind Festival of Nature as well as Overstory, a tree inspired art installation with activities involving art and nature that visited Broadmead in the summer of 2022.
The Walking Forest is being delivered as one of the activities under the City Centre and High Streets Recovery and Renewal programme, funded by Bristol City Council and the West of England Combined Authority’s Love our High Streets project.
Find out more about what else is on at Festival of Nature 2023 here.
