‘Native Regenerative’ on display for LDF 2021

The Sebastian Cox studio and workshop has installed 'Native Regenerative', a presentation of work from our living, bedroom and dining collections, in 14 Cavendish in celebration of the London Design Festival 2021.

In a climate and biodiversity emergency, is sustaining really enough? Who wants to sustain what we have now anyway? Britain is one of the most nature depleted countries in the world, so retaining the present is not the vision of the future we should hold in our sights. To put back what we’ve destroyed, we must be regenerative in what we do and consume.

Our presentation demonstrates that what we harvest, make and buy can be part of the solution in this crisis if we ask, 'what resources does nature want to give us?'.

Visit Design House at 14 Cavendish between 18 - 26 September, 11:00 - 19:00. We're proud to be in good company, alongside 1882 Ltd, Ruup and Form, Tiipoi, Angus Hyland, Marion Deuchars, Pentagram, Isokon Plus, Jasper Morrison, The Wrong Shop and Jochen Holz.

Find out more and plan your visit, here.

Further reading: What do we mean when we say Native Regenerative? Where did this name come from?

Earth’s natural processes are abundant with regeneration. The balanced carbon cycle, the trophic cascades of food chains, the cycle of hydrology; all examples of systems that build and give life over long, long periods of time. We need to be smarter, and recognise that synchronising with these systems is the only way we can allow this planet to recover. Technology will have some answers to the mess we’ve made, but most will be found in nature’s cycles.

One such cycle we should recognise is the relationship between large herbivores and vegetation. Across the earth, plants have evolved to be smashed, trampled and munched by vegetarian beasts which, in doing so, prevent land from becoming high forest. Undisturbed, all temperate land eventually gets darkened by tree canopy, making height the qualification of survival. Counterintuitive perhaps, but thriving trees are not always the sentinel of biodiversity. Coppicing proves this, with biodiversity much higher in harvested woodlands than unmanaged ones.

In the UK, cattle and their descendants roamed our island for millennia, alongside elephants and deer, preserving an ever-changing patchwork of varied habitats, from heathland high forest with scrubland in between. It’s a very recent phenomena for a cow to only see short grass in their life, and even more recent for their sights to be fixed on a bucket of grain or soy beans. Cattle belong in woodland as much as they do on the pastural side of the fence, and their presence among the trees is good for the ecosystem they engineer, and good for them.

By recognising this, we can see woodlands as places which yield more than just trees. If we can obtain timber, nuts, fruit, meat, leather, bone, browse and forage, tree-hay, perhaps clay, chalk and iron from our woodlands as our medieval ancestors did, we will be achieving the essence of sensible 21st Century living, which is to lighten our land footprint by drawing more than one resource from it.

Rewilding is proving that free-roaming native animals create abundances of other wildlife. We should wild more of our land, but we cannot do this by offshoring more of our land footprint. It is clearly unethical to fell tropical rainforests to supply us with food, while we afforest here for our pleasure and well-being. So when we do rewild, we must search for resources in those new wild spaces and maximise yield without degrading the wild land, like we do in our woodland, mill, studio and workshop. That is the essence of native and regenerative.