In the Lancashire coastal town of Morecambe, there has been talk of Eden Project’s futuristic biomes being built beside the shoreline overlooking the bay for a decade.
But this summer, spades will finally break ground to make the project a reality, with the visitor attraction expected to open in less than two years.
As plans are being finalised, and excitement is building locally, a group of young people are heading to Chelsea flower show to display the community garden they have helped design as part of the project and offer the world a first glance of Eden Project Morecambe.
Designed by the award-winning landscape designer Harry Holding, the Bring Me Sunshine garden will be relocated to Morecambe to form the centrepiece of a new 1.6-acre community garden after the show. It will be a “gift” to the local area, and will sit adjacent to but outside the paid perimeter of the Eden Project and will be free for all to use.
Holding said Chelsea was “an amazing opportunity for Eden Project to really promote the fact that Eden Project Morecambe is happening, but at the heart of that is to put Morecambe on the map”.
The new site will have two domes – “the realm of the sun and the realm of the moon” – the former filled with plants, and the latter a digital theatrical space.
“What it’s doing is actually helping remind people about nature’s natural rhythms,” said the Eden Project’s chief executive, Andy Jasper. “And the big thing that reminds us of that is the tide that goes out here.
“It goes out and reveals about 100 square miles of sand, and when it comes back in, it’s coming in so fast that it’s faster than the galloping horses.”
The aim, he said, was to remind visitors that all life on Earth was governed by “the celestial beings in space”.
Since it opened in Cornwall in 2001, with a relatively small £210m capital spend, Eden Project has had a £68bn economic impact in south-west England, and has created and sustained 690 jobs for 25 years.
The Morecambe site is a net zero carbon pilot project, with sustainable measures built into it, and Jasper said: “Personally, I’m slightly worried that this is going to make Eden Cornwall look a little bit out of date.”
Morecambe faces significant challenges; deprivation exceeds national averages, with child poverty rates as high as two in three in some areas, and many of its young people feel the only way to get ahead in life is to leave.
A lot of hopes are being pinned on the Eden Project as a driver for change.
“It’s making me a bit more optimistic about what can happen in Morecambe and the area,” said Ruby Goodwin, a 23-year-old horticulture student. “More opportunities for people, because it’s not going to just be Eden Project. There’s going to be other investment going on around it as well, hospitality and stuff. Increasing those sorts of jobs should be good for everybody.”
Goodwin is one of the young people – several of them not in education, employment, or training – who have helped Holding design the garden, and they will be heading to London to showcase their work.
Their sessions, which have run since early 2024, have involved everything from “bigger picture” workshops drawing on what Morecambe means to them, to practical suggestions for how they would use a community garden, to going out into different habitats to find “beautiful objects” that may be incorporated into the space.
“It feels like a seed has been planted and it’s starting to grow,” Chloe Jane Hirst, 23, a freelance performer and songwriter who is another of the young people involved in the project. “It’s the start of something. I don’t know what it’s going to be yet. But I want to be around [for it].”
Hirst suggested local people should be given free entry to the Eden Project once it opens. “There’s two ways it could go,” she said. “It could either be to have lots of people who are not local and who have lots of money come in, make this big shiny thing, and then lots of tourists flock here and the locals are forgotten, and they’ll get very angry and have no reason to care. Or it could be the flip side, that the community actually feels like it’s for them.”
Her fiance, Jordan Baker, 25, said: “Morecambe’s been promised a lot in the past and we’ve just not seen any of it come to fruition. See that blue fence over there? That used to be a fairground. I’ve heard there’s going to be a shopping centre there, a housing development, a car park – none of it’s come to fruition. So I feel like a lot of people hear ‘Eden Project’ and just hear echoes of that.”
Although there is a lot resting on Eden Project, Jasper is confident. “I know this model works,” he said. “It worked for Cornwall. It’s going to work here in Morecambe as well.”
The project director, John Pye, says he is aware it may face “many” challenges, including “cost pressures globally, not least with recent events”.
“And the weather,” he added. “We’re on the coast, we’re in the north of England, we’re building a very tall structure, what could possibly go wrong?”
But he said, after a decade of talk, “I think this year will be the year of change.”
“We understand why people are frustrated and feeling like, ‘We’ve been there’, we heard it,” he said. “But this year is the year we can actually say we are confident there are going to be diggers in the ground.”
