Vessels for Estuary 2025 announced!

The programme details for the large-scale contemporary arts festival Estuary 2025 – Vessels have been announced. Celebrating the stories, places and people of the Thames Estuary, the third edition of the festival takes place from 21-29 June 2025, with nine days of performances, installations and events across the region.

Through the theme of ‘Vessels’, Estuary 2025 looks beyond the boats and ships that move in and out of the Thames Estuary, to think about the festival itself as a vessel – exploring people’s complex and changing relationship to this unique landscape.

Taking place every four years across the South Essex and North Kent coastlines the festival explores the rich and often overlooked stories of estuary people and places, creating extraordinary arts experiences inspired by unexpected places. Originally conceived and programmed by Metal in 2016 as a catalyst to embed long-term change in the perceptions and visibility of the region, this third edition of the festival marks its first as an independent arts organisation.

The festival coincides with both spring and neap tides which offers the unique opportunity to engage with the Thames Estuary on both land and water. Projects such as Changing Tides, SALT, Anchored and Thought Forms, take place on the water of the Estuary with performances on a sailing barge, in tidal pools and in a nineteenth century military fort, whereas up and down the coastline of the Estuary, land projects such as Call me Back!, and Sleeping with the Dead reimagine a giant BT phone box and contemplate a relocated mass grave.

Thea Behrman, Artistic Director and CEO said:

“Our theme for this edition is ‘Vessels’, which in the context of the Thames Estuary might first conjure pictures of boats and ships – the vessels that transport so much in and out of this region. But the people, flora and fauna of the area are vessels too: carriers of ideas and aspirations, stories and myths, memories from the past and hopes for the future.

Estuary 2025 is a vessel too, bringing newly commissioned artworks to forge new connections and resurrect old ones: it is only relatively recently that rivers have been seen as barriers that need to be crossed by land – for much more of their history they have been waterborne thoroughfares – the primary way to meet and interact.

At the heart of the programme is a love letter both to this remarkable region that has inspired artists for millennia and to our fantastic collaborators from the Estuary – from youth clubs and yacht clubs to brass bands and dancers who have joined us in the journey to realising this festival.”

The Estuary 2025 Programme:

ANCHORED (21 June, Anchor Wharf, Chatham Historic Dockyard)

A collaboration between LV21, a light vessel, and Scarabeus Aerial Theatre, Estuary 2025 presents the world premiere of ANCHORED, a site responsive outdoor performance inhabiting the body and soul of the vessel while creating lineage with the surroundings. Aerial performers, through a highly visual and impactful choreography enhanced by an atmospheric soundtrack and a bespoke lighting design, inhabit various outdoor upper deck and infrastructure elements of the ship.

As the Midsummer sun sets beyond the horizon, they create a series of moving images and sequences at height, aimed at broadening and shifting conventional perspectives, using the unique features of the historic vessel.

SALT (27 & 28 June, Concord Beach Eastern Esplanade)

SALT is a new climate-responsive performance from Arbonauts – artist duo Helen Galliano and Dimitri Launder. Bringing their distinct process of working intensively with communities through movement and site, SALT is a live event created for and performed in the water of a tidal pool on Canvey Island.

In the shadow of a sea wall, alongside the rhythm of daily tides, SALT is performed by a dynamic, intergenerational group of over 20 performers including local open-water swimmers who took part in SILT (2021) and students from BA Physical Theatre course at East 15 Acting School.

Call Me Back! (21 June – 29 June, Various Locations)

Call Me Back! charts Damilola Odusote’s distinct upbringing growing up in the Thames Estuary. It explores the issue of identity and uses his personal history to highlight the complexity of political, cultural and identity dislocation. Damilola was born to Nigerian parents and fostered by a White couple in Tilbury, Essex. He delves into the underlying issues that formed his identity as a person of colour raised in a culturally and economically deprived port town in Essex by foster parents from a Romany heritage.

Call Me Back! is Damilola’s first public art commission, an installation inspired by a BT phone booth from the 1990s which was a landmark meeting point in Tilbury close to where he grew up. This booth with an oversized phone inside is a physical and metaphorical symbol of connecting to the past and emanates the sense of childlike innocence and nostalgia that everything appears larger than life from a child’s view. Damilola has revisited the schools he attended as a child to incorporate their stories into the artwork asking: “When you only have 10p in your pocket during a time of crisis, who would you call? More importantly, who would call you back?”

Sleeping with the Dead (28-29 June, Reburial site adjacent to Willow Cemetery, Canvey Island)

When £18.5 billion was invested in Crossrail to build Transport for London’s Elizabeth Line, part of the Bedlam burial ground was unearthed (active 1569 to 1738). The full site contained approximately 25,000 bodies during its 180 years of active use which represented a large proportion of Londoners at the time. The cemetery contained the remains of the poor, the rebellious, diseased, dissenters and the mad. Many people living in Essex will be descended from the disarticulated remains of 3000 people who were respectfully disenterned by T Cribb & Sons in 2016.

YoHa, a local artist group with an international reputation for pioneering arts projects, are proposing a remembrance of those in the mass grave reinterred from Bedlam Burial Ground to a reburial site adjacent to Willow Cemetery, Canvey Island. The project provides a comfortable space to sleep with the dead while listening to donated heartbeats and under-grave sounds.

Thought Forms (21-29 June, Fort Darnet)

Thought Forms is a brand new site-specific participatory work from Ben Judd, that will be located on the River Medway and Fort Darnet, a nineteenth-century military installation on a small island. The work, which will transport audience members to the island by boat, explores ideas around community and islands, both real and imaginary.

The project takes inspiration from folklore associated with the nearby Isle of Sheppey which suggests that until 653 CE the residents of the island thought they were alone in the wilderness, even though they could see mainland Britain from their own shoreline. They believed the nearby coastline to be a reflection, and that Sheppey was situated in a large mirror box. The folk tale concludes when a member of the community built a canoe and made the journey to the mainland at which point they realised they were not alone.

A Circular and Never-ending Ritual of Love to the Estuary (including Hope for the Future, Recipes for Action and a Call to the Blood) (21-29 June, Various Locations)

A Circular and Never-ending Ritual of Love to the Estuary is a self-guided immersive sound walk in three parts and live performance devised by multidisciplinary artist Nwando Ebizie. The project positions itself as a folk horror story told in many parts, taking us on a mythic journey that both connects us to the land and its history, and encourages us to look inward. It invites us to see the land as a waste land, but also to see it in its beauty. The artist inspires us to gain a sense of ownership of this particular landscape through collective action. The project can be experienced through three audio walks – in Tilbury, Gravesend and on Canvey. Using headphones, the audience will be guided by listening, walking and visioning in a ritual preparation towards action.

Changing Tides (21-29 June, Benfleet Yacht Club)

Changing Tides is a multi arts series presented aboard Thames Sailing Barge Raybel, celebrating the cultural diversity of the Estuary and local initiatives geared towards sustainability, heritage and public engagement. Included in the programme are two ‘On the Move’ events which will invite guest artists to perform whilst under sail on a traditional Sailing Barge between Isle of Sheppey and Canvey Island; as well as static live music events aboard the barge.

Performances and events aboard Raybel include: benjin: The Last Days of Sail, exploring the multiple ways in which benjin’s instrumental compositions, song poems, and dense sound collage improvisations have been informed through a lifetime of working on the Thames Estuary; Sea Shanties, Race and Erasure in Song with Mataoi Austin Dean, acapella song, discussion and poetic reflections on the politics of Folk music; and Heritage Work; Class Identity and the Preservations and Performances of Thames Sailing Barges with David Nettleingham, casting a critical eye over the politics of heritage work in North
Kent.

Clubbing & commune-ing in Essex – (21-29 June, Basildon)

Artist Emma Edmondson and writer Tim Burrows are bringing the good times back to south Essex with a series of interventions that interrogate the once dominant nightclub culture of Essex. The project will be launched with major new artistic and literary works. Emma Edmondson presents We thought it was going to last forever, a video installation housed in a deconstructed frame of an old Ford Escort, as well as a series of paintings, Remains 1, 2, 3, 4…, a series of sculptural paintings in enamel and photo transfer on
recently demolished Basildon concrete.

A new book edited by Tim Burrows will be published at the same time. See You Down Raquels: Clubbing and Commune-ing in Essex features newly commissioned essays by music critic and political commentator Dan Hancox on Essex and grime; artist Morgan Quaintance on the end and the future of rave; queer historian Sarah Wayman on the history of LGBTQ spaces in Essex; original Essex clubber Mike Fordham on the height of the soul clubs; Emma Edmondson on the concept of the dancefloor; and a piece by Burrows himself detailing the intense history and potential futures of Essex clubbing, centred around the story of Raquels in Basildon. Emma’s new works will be shown alongside events featuring the
book’s collaborators.

The Dreamshare Seer (Online)

The Dreamshare Seer by Adam Chodzko, is a new interactive public artwork using generative AI to transform descriptions of people’s sleeping dreams into visual animations. Created with the inhabitants of the Isle of Sheppey, Kent, The Dreamshare Seer tool then maps these shared dream visions through its Dream Cloud, automatically gathering around themes or motifs they have in common, whilst indicating where the dreams emerge from on the Island.

The Dreamshare Seer offers a new surreal way for us to connect with each other and to the landscapes we inhabit, informed by indigenous knowledge of dreamwork. Although the first Dream Cloud is being formed by dreams from the Isle of Sheppey’s residents, The Dreamshare Seer tool can be trialled by anyone, anywhere in the world, to visualise their dreams. https://dreamshareseer.org/

Dreamspace: Pending Approval (22 & 24 June, Hadleigh Farm Estate, Benfleet, Essex)

Dreamspace: Pending Approval is a site responsive collaborative project with artists Emma Edmondson and Shaun C. Badham. Prior to, and during Estuary 2025, the artists will host a programme of live events including talks, workshops and performance on a rural site. These sessions will bring participants together to dream up a sculpture as a structure for public use which will subsequently lead to the construction of a versatile outdoor shelter for learning, making and other uses by those who come upon it or live and work nearby.

This collaborative project takes its starting point that as humans we are only ever temporary stewards of the land, and the structures we insert into the landscape should be thought of as the same. The project has been supported by the Salvation Army connecting audiences to their ambitious largescale Estuary rewilding programme.

Common Grounds 19-25 June Riverside Country Park. 27 June – 6 July, Wat Tyler
Country Park, Pitsea, Basildon)

Common Grounds is a new collaboration between We Live Here and award-winning photographer Allie Crewe connecting local and refugee/asylum seeker communities in Medway and Essex through themes of landscape, nature and belonging. It will explore women’s experiences of landscape and nature as places of solace and health, but also places of risk, danger and threat, both real and symbolic.

A largescale outdoor photographic exhibition displayed in Gillingham and Pitsea for Estuary 2025 in partnership with Estuary Festival and LV21. It will create a hub for public discussion and debate around themes raised in the project, in particular, who has access to natural landscapes and on what grounds, what barriers do people face in accessing the benefits of nature in their own lives, and how can engagement with nature foster a sense of community, connection and belonging.

Hop Aboard (21-29 June, Chatham Historic Dockyards, 21 & 22 June, Gravesend Town
Pier)

The HOP ABOARD! programme will invite audiences and participants to explore how movement, memory, and time shape our understanding of place. It investigates the shifting landscapes of the Estuary, the trades and industries that have defined it, and their own role in imagining its future. Work will explore the Estuary’s past (its industries, railway history, or landscapes before development); The present (what they see today); and an imagined future (a utopian, dystopian, or ecologically transformed Estuary).

HOP ABOARD! is Estuary 2025’s engagement programme including workshops and resource packs for local schools and live briefs with FE colleges culminating in two professionally curated exhibitions led by commissioned artist Maraid Mcewan. The project has been supported by Southeastern and is part of the Railway 200 programme celebrating the 200th anniversary of the birth of the modern railway.

The People Will Possess the Wind (21 & 22 June, Canvey Island, Southend Pier,
Hampton/Herne Bay and Sheerness)

The People Will Possess The Wind will engage citizens of North Kent and South Essex in reimagining our relationship with wind energy. Through sailing on the Estuary, live choir performances, film, mass-distribution publications, and online materials, the project is designed to inspire us to question the nature of our relationship to The Wind. Whether it’s a soft South Westerly from the Atlantic or an iron-cold North Easterly, The People Will Possess The Wind challenges us to question where these winds come from, who they belong to, whose energy is harnessed by the turbines off Herne Bay and Shoeburyness (owned by Swedish multinational Vattenfall) and the difference between ownership and possession.

Sea Like a Mirror (21-22 June, The Clarendon Royal Community Garden, Gravesend)

Sea Like a Mirror marks the 200th anniversary of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), and it is inspired by the profound legacy of their life-saving work. Produced through a series of visits to lifeboat stations and seaside towns around the coastline, and in close collaboration with those who hold a deep connection to the water, including oyster fishers, windfarm technicians, wild swimmers, the work explores the sea’s innate duality as a place of wonder and peril, and the myriad roles it plays for coastal communities.

This travelling work, housed within a unique, custom-made sculptural tent will be installed on the seafront, immersing audiences in the stories of RNLI crew and local people from around our coastline. Alongside Ivan’s Morrison’s new artwork White Horses are Still Waters an immersive new sound work and Words on the Wind which invites participants to a ceremony at the water’s edge accompanied by a ceremonial singing circle hosted by Lauriem.

Submarine Consciousness, Or What Have You (21-29 June, Hadleigh Farm Estate,
Benfleet)

Breakwater, the artist duo of Youngsook Choi and Taey Iohe, present a new project exploring historical and contemporary ideas of rewilding in and around Hadleigh Farm in the Thames Estuary. The project considers the neocolonial relations of Essex as the backyard of the capital and their impact on environmental degradation, as well as remarkable survival and resilience. It unpacks the complex narratives of the flood-altered landscapes, local submarine psyche, social and environmental trauma, a witness to the interspecies resilience, and intense ecological negotiations within the Estuary.

Engaging the audience through the immersive experience of the hydrosphere, ghostly conversations, an overlaid cartographic mess, intimate reading and a walking ritual. The installation and participatory sound walks resonate with each other, focusing on the entanglement of cockle habitats with the landscape of extraction, shaped by toxic waste disposal, industrial fisheries, military operations, and the global trade gateway.

Threads for Tomorrow (21-29 June Knightswick Shopping Centre, Canvey Island)

What tales does our waste tell? Threads for Tomorrow breathes new life into discarded materials, transforming them into a celebration of sustainability, craftsmanship and cultural connection. At the heart of this commission is the embroidering together of 500 Beach of Dreams Silks, damaged in storms along the South Coast in 2023.

Renowned designer and textile artist Rahemur Rahman leads this ambitious project, collaborating closely with eight sewing groups based along the Thames Estuary. Each group is crafting its own unique and intricate silk panel, drawing on global craft techniques and infusing their designs with elements reflective of their local surroundings. These panels, made from fragments of the original silks, are embellished with naturally dyed threads and waste materials gathered from the banks of the Thames Estuary. The finished panels will form part of the sails for two contemporary, sampan-inspired mobile structures, co-designed
by Rahemur and Kinetika.

Adding to the spectacle, a vibrant carnival costume will be designed by artist Sarah Doyle in collaboration with Rahemur Rahman, students from the South Essex College Royal Ballet and Opera House Costume Construction degree course and the participating sewing groups, serving as a striking centrepiece. It celebrates the resilience of materials and communities alike, offering a compelling testament to the beauty that can emerge through reinvention, collaboration, and shared creativity.

The Library of Lost Sounds, 28 & 29 June, Canvey Wick Nature Reserve, 276
Northwick Rd, Canvey Island SS8 0PT

The Library of Lost Sounds collects important sounds that were never recorded, recreating
how they were felt through the whole body, not only how they might have been heard. On 17
September 1997, a 450 feet high concrete chimney stack on Canvey Island was accidentally
demolished a day early. TV personality Fred Dibnah, who was in charge of the demolition,
jokingly labelled it ‘The Canvey Island Chimney Disaster’. On the weekend of 28-29 June,
visitors can hear the sound and feel both the vibrations and shockwaves of the chimney
stack being destroyed on its original site (now within Canvey Wick nature reserve), which
has remained lost and without an audience for all these years.

Estuary 2025 film programme, 21-29 June, Wat Tyler Country Park, Basildon; 21-22
June, Gravesend Town Pier, Gravesend DA11 0BJ

A full film programme featuring the work of international and local artists to be announced. Each film will explore the theme of Vessels from multiple perspectives and will be available at screening venues across the Estuary.

Estuary Anthology, 21-29 June, various locations

The Thames Estuary is overflowing with wild and surprising creativity. The Estuary Anthology is the festival’s showcase for independently-produced activities for audiences to enjoy alongside the main Estuary 2025 programme. Highlights include:

Words from the Sphere unveiling a new poetry bench with writers Lucia Dove, Jessica Taggart Rose, Gareth Evans, Daniel Kramb. To Have and to Hold centred around the UK’s

largest concrete garden ornament manufacturer, Whelans Garden Ornaments on the Isle of Sheppey. Sightings of Home outdoor installation of paper sails flying across the Thames.

All events are free. Some events are pre-bookable with tickets live on 24 April. For further information visit: https://www.estuaryfestival.com/

Estuary 2025 is supported by 54 partners including Arts Council England’s Place Partnership investment and National Highways Designated Funds.

Danny spoke to Thea Behrman, artistic director and CEO of Esturay Festival 2025.