Christopher BarrettBoomtown Fair and Wake The Tiger co-founder Luke Mitchell (left) and chief commercial officer Lucy Jarjoura (right) take AAA on a hard hat tour of the new 80,000 sq. ft. ‘amazement park’ set to open at Westfield London on 15 October.
Wake the Tiger first roared into life in the summer of 2022 at Boomtown Fair’s Bristol headquarters, with the festival’s key players having conceptualised it during the Covid pandemic as a way of providing an all-year-round version of Boomtown’s narrative.
Now a certified B Corporation, led by a team including Mitchell and CEO & co-founder Graham MacVoy, Wake The Tiger remains an independent operation. Its first installation initially covered 1,000 square meters and involved 15 rooms but such was the strength of demand that its creators have since doubled it in size.
The Bristol-based immersive attraction, or amazement park as the team like to call it, has attracted over half a million visitors from more than 70 countries since its doors were first opened.
On the back of that success, it was perhaps unsurprising that Wake The Tiger would be unleashed elsewhere. The new London incarnation of Wake The Tiger, called Absurd City, was inspired by the concept of a metropolis operating by different rules, with visitors invited to explore four themed districts complete with unfolding stories, unexpected discoveries, and secret passageways.
The self-guided Wake The Tiger London experience, which is expected to see visitors take up to three hours to explore, will be able to accommodate more than one million visitors per year; with 200 people admitted every 30 minutes. Jarjoura says the business model has been based on an annual attendance of 600,000.
Luke Mitchell, who as well as being Wake The Tiger’s co-founder is its chief creative officer, says Absurd City blends counter-culture art and world-class storytelling with a deep commitment to environmental sustainability and social responsibility.
Amid the polished surfaces of the countless pristine emporiums promoting consumerism in the seemingly endless expanse that is Westfield London, a relatively unremarkable door leads to an alternative world that provides a very different perspective on life.
With Absurd City very much a work in progress, as we enter the huge site it is a hive of activity; with team members painting, crafting and building scenic elements and sets around us.
Dressed in the de-rigueur hard hat and hi-vis, Mitchell enthusiastically points out everything from huge installations to intricate, hidden, creative elements throughout the site. Once complete, the space will be home to a self-guided experience designed to spark imagination and encourage environmental sustainability and social responsibility. He describes it as “a cosmic, eccentric, and deeply human playground”.
Jarjoura explains that the Bristol and London versions of Wake The Tiger are narratively connected: “The Bristol site, called Dream Factory, and Absurd City are set in separate places within the parallel world of Meridia. That world has seen a complete collapse environmentally and ecologically. We are a positive impact organisation with a vision to inspire and disrupt for a better world. The idea of Wake The Tiger is to avoid greenwashing, preaching and scaremongering, while connecting audiences to what is going on around them in our world, in a way that inspires and engages them to take positive action.”
That focus on sustainability not only means that much of the sets have been built of re-proposed materials and items, but also extends to everything from the products sold at the onsite cafe to the gift shop. “We have some great collaborations,” says Jarjoura. “For the gift shop Oxfam are going to be supplying T-shirts that we can then re-wash and and print onto, and any plastic waste from the cafe is going to be turned into key rings.”
It’s been an extremely busy year for Mitchell who has been balancing working on the launch of the huge new Wake The Tiger installation, which is four times the size of the Bristol original, with the opening of a redesigned Boomtown on the back of its capacity having been expanded by 20%.
“It has been hard work but the team is incredible,” he says. “The ecosystem around Boomtown and Wake The Tiger is enormous and involves a mixture of people, some of who have been with us for 15 years while others are complete newcomers. The beauty of these projects is that no one person could come up with the ideas; it’s the wealth of imagination that results in such powerful creative expression.”
With Absurd City involving the work of hundreds of individuals, Mitchell is keen to flag up the many production crew contributors to Absurd City. Among them have been Brutal.London, Fables Creative, Dead Walk Designs, Tandem Productions and Good Life Events.
“On this project you have teams from theme parks, the festival industry, the construction industry and film industry collaborating. That’s been amazing. I don’t think that’s ever happened in the creation of an immersive experience where you’ve got such different individual expertise.
“They have given us ideas and advice about things such as building permanent elements, how best to move people around the spaces, and how to create the tech integration side of things. It’s been a massive learning curve.”