UK Pavilion: Building on the Past, Shaping our Future

About the Pavilion

A Dramatic demonstration of UK creativity

Shanghai World Expo will be the most spectacular and important event of its type. It is an Expo for the 21st Century and the UK have designed and built a Pavilion that reflects the splendour of the Expo2010. The Pavilion is a striking, visual demonstration of the UK as a creative and innovative nation; exactly as Crystal Palace was in the very first Expo in London in 1851. Developed by one of the UK’s leading creative talents, Thomas Heatherwick, the centrepiece of the UK pavilion is a six storey high object formed from some 60,000 slender transparent rods, which extend from the structure and quiver in the breeze. During the day, each of the 7.5m long rods act like fibre-optic filaments, drawing on daylight to illuminate the interior, thereby creating a contemplative awe-inspiring space. At night, light sources at the interior end of each rod allow the whole structure to glow. The pavilion sits on a landscape looking like paper that once wrapped the building and that now lies unfolded on the site.

Our Theme

The overall theme for UK at Expo revolves around the essence of our brand: Changing the Chinese perception of the UK. It takes into consideration the entire message of the Pavilion: "UK Pavilion: Building on the Past, Shaping our Future"

This overall theme fits in with the overall Expo theme of a Better City, Better Life; it provides an overarching concept that brings together the many different stories and facets that make up the entire UK at Expo effort; and positions the UK as taking a leading role in future development.

Entering the British Pavilion

On entering the British Pavilion, the visitor sets foot inside the UKs gift to China. The Seed Cathedral and its surrounding area show the gift in its unwrapped state, the creases forming the canopy over the walkways where the visitor embarks on their journey.

The journey consists of a series of walkways that take the visitor on an experience reflective of a visit to a UK public park – the first thing that makes it unique is its ‘openness’, there is no roof, there is an open space where people can sit, relax and take in a performance; or choose to walk through a series of walkways and visit the seed cathedral representative of an amazing sculpture. The components in the UK Pavilion park combined, illustrate the UK’s past and present and vision for the future of city life.

The Journey

The journey through the UK Pavilion is separated into five parts:

Part 1: The Way Thing Are: a Green and Pleasant Urban Landscape

Walkway 1 and 2: Green City and Open City

The first part explores the way things are in the UK, presenting the urban landscape – how it has evolved from the past to the present .The UK has a rich tradition of incorporating green spaces and water into its cities– from public parks and private gardens to lakes, fountains, rivers, canals and ponds. The UK’s temperate climate nurtures this lush urban landscape.

Walkway 1: As you move along the walkway, you travel through the four UK capitals from west to east; Belfast, Cardiff, London and Edinburgh.

London in particular is 40% green, making it the greenest city of its size in the world. The city's long historical link with nature and green spaces includes the creation of Victoria Park in 1842 to fight diseases and improve the health and well-being of East London's working class. Still at the heart of East London, the park now provides a place for meetings, concerts and festivals. The best way to show how green British cities really are was to erase all the buildings and streets leaving only the green spaces. Walkway 1 shows a series of ‘green maps’ which illustrate the green space in each of the four cities.

Walkway 2: After leaving the first walkway, you proceed into 'Open City', where you are met with luminous fluctuations of light spilling onto the passage floor. A typical British City is suspended from the ceiling. Acrylic buildings are arranged in groups of typical city districts: Suburban area, High street, Urban, Industrial and Business district. Amongst them 'Light Rain' engines arranged in the form of 'clouds' project animated drops of light onto the floor. The architecture represented includes department stores, high street shops, apartment mansions, factories, city blocks and detached houses, which have become iconic British designs in the world of architecture.

Walkway 2 illustrates that the architecture of UK cities embrace nature, and doesn’t shed away from rain nor wind, as exemplified in the relative absence of covered areas or shopping malls. In the design of cities natural elements are transformed for the city dweller into elements of play (see children playing with puddles), life (the greenness of the parks) and contemplation (the numerous ponds). Cities have been designed encapsulating the openness of the natural elements. Traditionally UK cities are low built, attaching an importance to the sky, creating an airy-ness which does not often occur in high-rise world capitals.

Part 2: The Opportunity: Investing in Nature and Saving Seeds to Protect the Future

The Seed Cathedral

The Seed Cathedral itself is an object formed from 60,000 slender transparent rods, which will extend from the structure and quiver in the breeze. During the day, each of these 7.5 metre long rods will act like fibre optic filaments, drawing on daylight to illuminate the interior, thereby creating a contemplative awe-inspiring space. At night, light sources embedded in each rod will allow the whole structure to glow.

Your journey into the Seed Cathedral introduces you to the opportunity for change, growth and ideas embodied in seeds. Inside the Seed Cathedral is a unique visual representation of the UK’s leading role in conservation worldwide – Kew Millennium Seed Bank partnership – the largest collection of wild plant seeds in the world. By encasing tens of thousands of seeds into the ends of the transparent rods, you will be able to view examples of seeds of plant species that contribute to national and global conservation programmes. There is enormous potential for innovation and discovery held in the rich biodiversity of seeds: from new medicines and materials to construction techniques, communication systems and sustainable energy. The seeds have been sourced from the Germplasm Bank of Wild Species at the Kunming Institute of Botany. The Chinese Academy of Sciences in China is a partner in the Kew Millenium Seed Bank project.

Part 3: Living City

As you leave the Seed Cathedral, you enter the final walkway 'Living City'. In the Living City a ‘plant river’ spills out from an enormous crack in the canopy, with plant life bursting through, into the walkway. The river is a showcase for a rich variety of plants protruding through a slit along the canopy; a mix of living plants and imaginary future plants. You are encouraged to look closely to see which are real and which are modeled.

Eight living stories and eight imaginary stories are mixed within the plant river. These specific stories allow you to appreciate what plants and nature are doing for us in the city, how they increase health and wellbeing and provide a more comfortable sustainable place to live, how we can harness their benefits with the use of technological research, innovation and forward thinking, and what that means for the future, e.g. providing better communal spaces, air conditioning, stress relief, food, fuel, phyto-remediation, new products etc. The ‘Living City’ encourages you to imagine how things could be if we drew on the incredible resource of nature, generating new ideas to improve our cities and our lifestyles. It illustrates how science has used nature in areas as diverse as medicine and construction, and how plants of the future could offer solutions to climate change and other global concerns.

Part 4:The Urban Landscape

The Seed Cathedral sits on a landscape that gives the appearance of an unwrapped gift. This landscape represents the openness that the fabric of British society has been built. It provides an open space for public events which will demonstrate Arts and Culture and provide you an insight into the past, present and cutting-edge of performance art.

It will be a space where you can wander without any particular intent, yet at the same time you have the the ever-present possibility of experiencing a performance or an enjoyable spectacle large or small, or a view pleasing to the eye. Much of the daily programming, to be announced in March, will concentrate on original and inventive comedy performance designed to engage audiences of all ages, which draw on the UK's great tradition of theatre - stretching back to William Shakespeare - and on the current international reputation of our artists and performers for original, inventive and crowd-pleasing work. The performances throughout the six months of Expo will illustrate the traditional side of performance art and the most cutting edge and modern side of contemporary performance art.

Part 5:The Olympic Connection

Before you exit the Pavilion you will see the 2012 Legacy Corner. Just as at the start of the UK pavilion journey where you discovered the development of green spaces in UK cities as being an essential part of nurturing the wellbeing of urban residents, the 2012 Legacy Corner looks into the future with a visit to London after the Olympic Games of 2012. It illustrates how this green space legacy is being built on to the benefit of future generations. After the Games, the London Olympic Park will be transformed into one of the largest urban parks created in Europe for more than 150 years. The communities surrounding the Park will enjoy access to the open space; and economically, the area will be transformed with the creation of thousands of new jobs in the Park alone. Ten years ago, the Olympic site was an industrial wasteland; in a few years, it will have been transformed into a powerful reminder of the importance we attach to bringing nature back into our cities.