Seats at the Table

Seats at the Table was a co-designed installation for the London Festival of Architecture 2023. The winner of the ‘Co-designing Equity in the Public Realm’ competition, the project brought together a huge array of disabled and non-disabled people to create a set of seats, table and other accessible interventions focussed on disability and sustainability.

A series chairs were co-designed with six schools and youth groups in both mainstream and SEND education. The young people aged between 7-21 each responded to prompts to design considering disability. The designs were then collated into a chair for each group, which were fabricated by the team at The Bartlett, UCL Here East.

As a central focus of the chairs was a table, fabricated by the Remakery. Where possible the timber used throughout the project was reclaimed and table top was made from recycled yogurt pots.

Alongside the installation was extensive work to identify a suitable site and to adapt the site for accessibility. For this we worked with 20 disabled creatives in a series of co-exploration workshops. Once we had decided on our site of Postman’s Park in the City of London we were able to make a series of disabled led accessibility interventions, funded by Arts Council England. This included a blind led audio description of a memorial in the park.

The project culminated in a month long series of events exploring disability, accessibility and sustainability.

The project and events created a strong network of disabled creatives across art, architecture, making and writing, and has been the catalyst for many further projects and events.