A new immersive attraction opening in London this October promises to be a ‘cosmic, eccentric, and deeply human playground’. Paul Milligan speaks to Graham MacVoy from Wake The Tiger.
The creators of the Boomtown Fair music festival and the world’s first ‘Amazement Park’ are to open a new permanent 7,400 sq m immersive attraction at Westfield London shopping centre this October in the UK. This follows the success of its flagship Bristol location, which has drawn over half a million global visitors since 2022. Inspired by the concept of a metropolis operating on completely different rules, Absurd City invites visitors, called Daytrippers, to travel through a portal into a sprawling, vivid cityscape. Exact details of what’s inside haven’t been published yet, but the creators, Wake The Tiger, have revealed that visitors will journey through four districts, housed under a protective dome, filled with discoveries, secret passageways, and tactile installations.
“We believe culture and storytelling have the unique power to reshape how we see our future,” says Graham MacVoy, CEO and co-founder at Wake The Tiger. “Absurd City is an invitation to rediscover hope and community through a creative lens.” There is no blueprint for Absurd City says Luke Mitchell, chief creative officer and co-founder. “It’s been a beautifully chaotic process driven by some of the UK’s finest underground artists, robotic experts and makers. We’ve built a cosmic, eccentric, and deeply human playground that we can’t wait for London to explore.”
We sat down with MacVoy when the project was announced and began by asking him just what is an ‘Amazement Park’? “It’s obviously a play on words, but we sit in a space that engages with artists, and creativity is at our core. But, as an immersive experience, we don’t have a funfair or amusement rides. We've got a journey and an experience that we felt was undefined. We decided to create a genre and that seemed to do it because people have no idea what to expect.”
What experience has the Wake The Tiger team gathered from its Bristol site that it can bring to London? “This is the first one we’ve built away from home, so that’s brought a whole set of challenges that we aren’t quite as familiar with,” says MacVoy. “Having a good start, midpoint, and end are really important so people remember the experience. It has to have a cohesive trail throughout but that’s quite hard for us because we create non-linear experiences. It’s not a typical ‘this is the route, please go this way’ experience, it’s all about discovery and getting a bit lost, continually saying ‘whoa, I wasn’t expecting that’, and that makes storytelling very challenging. We definitely focused on the art in Bristol, but with London we’ve weaved through a much more cohesive story. It’s part of the same world and is the same story. It’s just another setting in the story.”
Why does MacVoy think interactive events are proving so popular right now? It’s being driven by demand, he says: “There’s been a 25% compound annual growth in the experience economy. The digital era is pushing that as well; people are trying to get off screens. We have got interactive screens in Absurd City, but other than taking photos, there’s no interaction with phones or anything like that. And I think people are looking for things that build memories now rather than possessions.”
Are audiences changing or evolving in terms of what they want from an experience? Or is it still that mix of education and entertainment, with some wow factor thrown in for good measure? People are definitely still looking for the wow factor he says, but there are other factors: “TikTok and Instagram are pushing people to say, ‘Look what I did’. It’s evolving. What Disney brought to the world was a bit of magic within theme parks and interaction, and we aspire to get to that level. One of the really great things about having our second park is that it’s allowed our workforce to grow, our staff numbers have tripled, because it’s bigger we’re getting a bit more experience through the team, immediately you’re seeing the new techs who have previously worked on The Lion King and cruise liners and other immersive experiences, so we can start using that expertise to elevate both Bristol and London.”
Like 99% of all visitor attractions, Absurd City caters to an age range of 5 to 85, so how much R&D and design work goes into making sure everything is intuitive for visitors of all ages? It’s incredibly challenging to do that admits MacVoy, and it has to work for your audience. “You start with a dream and very quickly it gets beaten back into the reality of what is actually achievable. We’ve had ideas, for example we were going to put in RFID in each room so you could click points, tap, make it more interactive. A couple of weeks later we agreed we needed to stop because the point of Wake the Tiger is to come into a place with your friends and family and be in surreal environments and connect with each other. The abstract visuals and interactions are to try and challenge your perspective of life and come up with new ideas and look at the world differently. We don’t want kids running around trying to collect 300 points just to beat each other. That just wasn’t what we were about. So we took that off the table.”
The revised plans now have terminals placed around the venue to help with storytelling, and the three levels of visitors MacVoy categorises as “skimmers, dippers and divers”. He explains: “85% of people are skimmers who are just there to enjoy themselves. 10% will want to dip into the story a bit more, and then 5% will dive even deeper into it. You’ve got to balance your design to keep all three of those levels engaged efficiently. We’ve got an amazing team here that work hard trying to achieve that. There’s always room for improvement, we did quite a lot of play testing, although we’d always like to do more. The beauty of this is we’re never finished.
It’s always evolving. We’re not opening with a finished product. It’s never going to be finished, if something doesn’t work, we’ll just take it out and try something new.” How can a company like Wake The Tiger compete with 4K OLED screens, fast WiFi and multiple tablets and phones in every home? The difference, says MacVoy, is that Wake the Tiger builds a physical, real-world environment that is tactile. “You’re in it, you can touch it, you can interact with it. There are more spectacular things than what we’ve built here that have more movement, more performance, more extreme adventure, etc, but with this, you step through a portal into a different world.”
There has been a constant stream of immersive experiences recently, but the term seems to have a very elastic meaning these days due to abuse by overzealous marketing departments. What techniques does MacVoy think work best to ensure a truly immersive experience for visitors? Wake The Tiger spends a long time working on the sets, with special attention paid to the ceilings. MacVoy explains why: “We work a lot on our roofs so that you feel enclosed. We make sure that all the roofs are themed so if you’re physically in a space, you’re not looking up and realising you’re in a shopping centre or a warehouse. You have to add layers of depth in the sets, if you have set with a house or flats in it, you can then add satellite dishes on it, have washing lines hanging out, lots of wires and some mould on the walls etc, it’s putting layer upon layer so you start to believe that you’re in that space a bit more, it’s trickery really.”
Juxtaposition is another aspect that can create a sense of excitement and wonder, and was something used to successful effect in Bristol says MacVoy. “You walk through one room, which is an elder forest, then you’ll walk out of that into an underground mycelium space or into a space that looks like a moonscape. You then start throwing people off the scent. Juxtaposition is important because we are trying to bump them out of their comfort zone and get them to ask themselves ‘What’s going on here? What are we doing here?’”
When Absurd City opens in October, the general public can ask themselves that question too.