Unfolded Walks: Children’s Urban Experiences: Bethnal Green, London, UK

[Above image: Exhibition view  © Unfolded Walks 2025 Creative Commons Licence CC BY-NC-SA]

This project is a collaboration between The Bartlett Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (UCL), Connected Environments Lab, ReMAP research centre at UCL Institute of Education, Young V&A, and a local primary school, supported by KEI2024-02-55 AHRC IAA KEIF Knowledge Exchange and Innovation Funding. 

Unfolded Walks is a collaborative research project inviting children to interpret their urban environment through creative and digital media. Over the past six months, the project brought together a primary school class from Tower Hamlets, the learning team at the Young V&A, and academics from UCL CASA and IOE, culminating in a showcase at the Young V&A at the end of September 2025.  

The project is based loosely around the myriorama, a nineteenth century game in which strips of card represent environments at ground level, eye level, and above.  sequence of events. 

These cards can be arranged in any order to tell stories about a space, a place, or a sequence of events.

Led by Valerio Signorelli from Connected Environments at UCL East, the team included Leah Lovett, Minna Nygren, and John Potter from the ReMap Centre at the UCL Institute of Education. They worked closely with children from the primary school and their teachers, supported by Kate Kennedy and the Young V&A team. 

On hot days over the summer, the children walked the Bethnal Green route between school and the museum, recording the area with GoPro cameras and Android tablets. These field recordings formed the raw material for arts-based workshops using drawing, painting, collage, video, and photography, alongside digital manipulation on tablets. 

The research team developed an onscreen myriorama toolkit shaped by the children’s ideas and choices. The project generated a mass of images, sounds, and compositions that can be organised in multiple ways to convey what mattered most to the young researchers. 

The final showcase at the Young V&A presented the digital myriorama alongside process materials created by the children during the project. It was attended by the participating children, their peers, teachers, researchers, and museum staff. The event also welcomed families, offering an opportunity for visitors to engage with the children’s perspectives on urban space. 

During the event, the children shared their reflections on the project, highlighting the creative discovery in bringing together analogue and digital methods: “I had so much fun drawing and using the iPads”; “I really enjoyed playing with the myriorama and I loved making the myriorama cards and I liked how we played with it on the iPads”; “Thank you for listening to our ideas and making us feel proud.” 

As a next step, the project team is keen to explore the potential uses of the digital myriorama in urban planning and policy to enable children to advocate for their views of the environment to be taken into account. If you would like to discuss possible applications of the toolkit with the team, please contact  Leah Lovett: l.lovett@ucl.ac.uk

Digital myriorama toolkit: https://unfolded-walks.cetools.org/