Broadway Tower

On Saturday we went to Broadway Tower. Broadway Tower is one of England's outstanding viewpoints and at 1024ft (312m) above sea level, it is the second highest point on the Cotswold ridge.

You can see for miles - maybe 60 on a clear day. One way it's the white horse in Melksham, the other way it's the Brecon Beacons. Wow...

Broadway Tower has enjoyed a number of well-known owners and occupants one of which was William Morris, famous architect, designer, poet and revolutionary used the Tower as a holiday retreat together with his friends Edward Burne-Jones and Gabriel Dante Rosetti.

We went there to check the place out with a view to doing some installations there in the darker months to come.

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Delighted to report we had a very, very positive experience... The Tower itself and the land it sits on are just ideal for largescale installations and we hope to get some going.

Not only have they got a superb looking building, but sitting on the edge of the scarp as it does it means they get really good wind when it's coming from a Westerley direction (which it does a lot in the UK)

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We were only there from 6-8, not even dark, and then only to give it a quick once over. We'd taken eight fws to put a few up and check how the wind flows around the site.

We put four up on the top of the Tower itself and a few in various locations around it. The four on the top simply went crazy. We could light the whole tower and you'd see it for miles and miles.

Hopefully we can come up with some ideas that will allow us to provide a mechanism to drive some serious visitor numbers to the site... Once the clocks go back at the end of October, there'll be lots of scope to put on some cool events and we fully intend on so doing.

We will only get a couple of shots at having the media cover any event we hold, but thankfully we've got a good little black book now, so we're gonna give this one some thought and put something fantastic together.

I'm picturing a couple of hundred fws on the hill for a week creating a fantastic spectacle, inviting people to walk amongst them, get up the tower at night, have a glass of mulled wine and a hotdog and then go home all fluffy with a bit of wind-in-the-hair...

As we get into the educational / corporate side of fw, there will doubtless be opportunities here for us to demo to small groups or make some super films.

Anyhow, watch this space...Big thanks to Neil for being such a great host and so helpful.

Visit the Broadway Tower website here and if you get the chance og and check it out for yourself. It's quite something...