MAKE Room
How can we reconnect with Nature?
What is MAKE Room?
What does it mean to truly connect with nature? To pause, notice, and engage with the landscapes we live in - not just as backdrops, but as collaborators in shaping more sustainable, imaginative futures?
MAKE Room is our new roaming arts programme that invites communities across Derbyshire to explore these questions. Through hands-on workshops, artist residencies, talks and walks, MAKE Room is creating space - literally and metaphorically - for people to come together and reimagine their relationship with the natural world.
Developed in collaboration with Buxton-based Glassball Studio, and shaped in collaboration with local partners. At its heart, MAKE Room is about curiosity, creativity, and climate – using art and making as a way to engage with the places we live and the futures we want to build.
Want to get involved?
Are you are an individual, group, organisation or school that wants to get involved? Then please fill out this form and we'll get back to you within 7-10 days.
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Where It Started: From Green Room to MAKE Room
MAKE Room began life as a concept developed through a six-week live project with students from the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture. Working under the project title Green Room, the students were asked to prototype a mobile, low-impact structure that could help facilitate environmental conversations in public spaces.
Through site visits, stakeholder interviews and design workshops, the students explored what a sustainable, community-led engagement space could look like. Their designs became the blueprint for MAKE Room - not as a fixed structure, but as a roaming idea that adapts to each place it lands.
Following this early R&D phase, Glassball Studio were commissioned to take the concept forward - developing the MAKE Room methodology and leading artist residencies in Glossop (High Peak) and Heanor (Amber Valley) to begin testing the approach in practice.
Who’s Involved?
MAKE Room is a collaboration between artists, communities, environmental groups, and cultural organisations across Derbyshire.
Glassball Studio are the lead artists, delivering place-based residencies and co-creating activities with local partners and residents.
In Glossop, our host partner is The Bureau, a wellbeing-focused community organisation who have helped root the programme in local priorities and run Move More Glossop, a partnership of community, sports, health, and council organisations that are passionate about inspiring people in Glossop to move more and make physical activity a part of their everyday lives. We're also working with Wilder Whitfield, working with local residents, schools, community groups and the Council to improve spaces for wildlife and people.
In Heanor, we are working with Make/Shift and Craft Wood — a woodland-based organisation offering creative, hands-on experiences for adults with a range of support needs.
The initial research was developed with students from the University of Sheffield’s School of Architecture, whose work helped shape the project's ethos.
Local Creative Project Ltd, producers of Derbyshire Makes, oversee MAKE Room’s delivery, coordination and wider strategy.
We are also working closely with Derbyshire County Council’s Environment and Economy Team to align with the county’s forthcoming Local Nature Recovery Strategy, due to be adopted in Summer 2025.