Join a series of thought-provoking events, exhibitions and activities exploring the spaces we inhabit, the communities we build, and innovative ideas for shaping a better future.
Exhibition content is accessible in the Urban Room space around other scheduled events. The space is typically open Monday to Friday to drop in.
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Museum of Broken Dreams
The Museum of Broken Dreams comes to the University of Plymouth’s Urban Room.
Sharing stories from the We’re Right Here campaign of community-led projects held back by bureaucracy and red tape, it explores what becomes possible when communities have the power and support to shape their own futures. Connections through Nudge Community Builders and Plymouth Octopus Project’s Stonehouse Stakeholders bring a local perspective, opening up conversations about community ambition, shared decision-making and how we can create the conditions for local ideas to flourish.
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Ageing Authentically by the Sea
A film and photographic portrait series exploring the voices and experiences of older people in Plymouth.
Over the past two months, Fotonow has been interviewing older residents and creating portraits that explore their lives, connections and experiences of growing older in our coastal city. The project emerges from
Professor Jocey Quinn's and
Dr Claudia Blandon's Leverhulme Trust Invisible Education Post 65 project. It responds to emerging research exploring how people aged 65 and over continue to learn, flourish and develop meaningful relationships with place in later life and looks at how home extends beyond the domestic environment to include neighbourhoods, coastlines, memories, objects and everyday encounters with the more-than-human.
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Living with Ceramics
'How you spend your days is how you live your life', set out as a calendar for August in 2026 made of ceramic tiles. It documents Gabrielle Tymkow's ongoing quest to create things with her hands, to think and write without the use of AI. She records drawings, thoughts, headlines, fragments of poetry that are created on each day and then made permanent by firing them onto ceramic. They become time capsules, like Jill Craigie's film – an incomplete snapshot of her life in 2026.
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The Pubs of Greenbank Walking tour
This is a guided walk and pub crawl with a difference.
We will visit all the pubs of Greenbank, whether still open or long closed, and explore the histories and stories they hold. Beginning at the top of the hill with the Hill Park Inn and ending at the recently demolished Plymouth Social Club opposite The Box, you will be invited to enjoy a historical tipple in many of these pubs as you like. The walk connects with the themes of The Way We Live (Jill Craigie, 1946) and draws on the oral history project Pubs of Greenbank which collected stories and memories of pubs goers in 2020–21, which was made possible through Mayflower 400 funding.
Discover the area of Greenbank through the lens of its pubs, hear memories of life and death, celebrations and wakes, darts and euchre, Napoleon and Nancy Astor, quakers and bulldozers. Come prepared to make new memories of the pubs of Greenbank, or perhaps share your own!
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Sound Game Experiment
‘Sound Game Experiment’ is an original performance created by Crab & Bee (Plymouth-based arts duo visual artist Helen Billinghurst and performance maker Phil Smith) specifically for the Urban Room.
Crab & Bee are deploying their diagrammatical method (as described in their book ‘Diagrammatical Performances’ [Routledge]) to address elements of the history, folklore and future uses of Plymouth Sound. From Drake and the witches summoning a storm against the Armada, via experimental autonomous submarine craft, to the strange cryptid report by Captain Peter M’Quhae from HMS Daedalus at anchor in the Hamoaze in 1848.
Drawing on extensive walks around and swims in the Sound, Crab & Bee will deploy a range of performance-methods including storytelling, ceremony, and the use of miscellaneous materials to map out these stories. Using the Urban Room as a ‘three-dimensional metaphor’ Crab & Bee’s ‘Sound Game Experiment’ will animate historical events, geological and geographical becomings, and fantastical imaginings.
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Frontierlands – Britain's survival in the making
The author of Frontierlands – Hazel Sheffield visits Plymouth for a panel discussion and evening of reimagining the future.
Hazel Sheffield is a business reporter and investigative journalist. Her work can be found in national and international publications like the Financial Times and The Guardian. Her recent book Frontierlands, published by Penguin, shares stories from communities around Britain – including Nudge, here in Plymouth! She explores how we can reclaim and reimagine land and buildings in ways that prepare us for the future.
The evening will include a panel discussion where Hazel will be joined by
Professor Alessandro (Alex) Aurigi , a Professor of Urban Design at the University of Plymouth – a researcher from the University of Plymouth who has recently been part of an international network studying neighbourhoods and inclusive space, contributing to the ‘Designing Signals of Inclusion’ (Routledge) with a case study on the Union Street area in Plymouth alongside people making things happen in their community, and Councillor Matt Smith who is Cabinet Member for Housing, City Centre Regeneration, and Events and currently leading the development of the City Living Framework.
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RICS in Plymouth – Unlocking delivery: Overcoming barriers to housing and regeneration in the South West
Demand for housing and investment continues to grow across the South West, yet many projects remain stalled by concerns around viability, rising costs, delivery risk and market uncertainty.
This event brings together leaders from local government, development, construction, investment and the wider built environment sector to explore one central question.
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POP Residency: Voice
Plymouth Octopus Project (POP) host a two-week residency in the University of Plymouth’s Urban Room, exploring voice: who is heard, who is overlooked and how we listen to each other.
Bringing together community organisations, researchers and residents, the programme includes POP’s AGM and experiments in collective decision-making, a celebration of Stonehouse Stakeholders success stories to complement the Museum of Broken Dreams, and informal opportunities to meet the POP team.
Connections with The Box’s The Way We Live exhibition and a shared viewing of the Live Well webinar, exploring how neighbourhood governance can unlock community power through lessons from Manchester, will open up wider conversations about shaping the places we live.
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We say the burden must be shared
Responding to The Way We Live (Jill Craigie, 1946), the work combines re-edited film sequences, a new script and a series of objects and moments extracted from the film to create a feminist toolkit for uncertain futures. How do we activate the fragments of the past in the present in ways that resist nostalgia and suggest new forms of collective action? Tannoys, withering glances, bread rations, umbrellas, fly paper, 'Victory' rolls and 1940s womenswear become strategic and collaborative defence technologies for a neo-military urban mise-en-scene. Made with Plenderleith Scantlebury, Bristol.
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RIBA Stirling Prize lecture: The UK’s best new building 2026 with Mary Duggan
Take your seat for Design West’s Annual Stirling Prize lecture.
Awarded annually to the UK’s best new building, the RIBA Stirling Prize is the country’s most prestigious architecture award.
Join us this November at the University of Plymouth as 2026 winner Mary Duggan shares the story of Lion Green Road – a powerful demonstration of what ambitious public housing can achieve.
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Designing Plymouth’s Future: join an unmissable sector discussion on design, regeneration and city living
An afternoon of discussion, project visits and connections exploring how design can shape Plymouth’s next chapter.
Plymouth is at a pivotal moment. With £4.4 billion being invested in Devonport and significant employment growth expected, how can ‘Britain’s Ocean City’ best deliver the homes and places needed to support its future?
Join Design West for a conversation bringing together government, city leaders, developers and designers to explore the role of design in city-centre regeneration and housing delivery.
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Dancing… and dancing… and dancing
'Dancing… and dancing… and dancing' asks how social dance – in public spaces, private spaces, with chosen and random groupings of people – can be a source of connection, and even home, in our communities.
Responding to the iconic scenes of Plymothians “dancing…and dancing…and dancing on the Hoe just as they did all through the ages…” in the film The Way We Live, the day positions dancing as a way to feel at home with each other. We ask: how are our traditions of moving together evolving? The day traces an evolution of social dance, picking up from the time period of the film with traditional swing dance and moving through to contemporary folk imaginaries and improvisations.
We begin with a workshop in and presentation of the history of swing, led by Mad About Swing. Next, the new Morris group MASH perform a suite of dances. Departing from the notion that 'folk is what the folk are doing now’, MASH makes dances drawing on shared cultural context for a mixed group of choreographers, dancers, live artists, musicians, artisans and enthusiasts, creating a joyful space in which to explore how their community moves together in a time when many spaces for artistic experimentation and research are disappearing. This will be followed by a contemporary dance improvisation in conversation with the film the Way We Live itself, with the artist-researchers reflecting through action on the histories in the film and composing a new performance in real time. How do tensions between a digital, screen-based life (at home and in public) interact with the human need to be present with each other and the real desire to move together? Finally, we all come back onto the dance floor, to experiment with these ideas themselves, using movements from the swing dance lessons earlier in the day, copying the MASH group’s moves, and getting creative, accompanied by a live band for a big, swing party!
Schedule
15:00–16:30 | Mad about Swing - swing dancing workshop and demonstration
16:45–17:30 | MASH contemporary Morris
17:45–18:30 | The Way We Live improv dance performance
18:30–20:00 | Dinner break - bring a picnic and grab a drink – imagine you're on the Hoe!
20:00–21:45 | Swing Party! With live band and dancing
15:00–16:30 | Mad about Swing - swing dancing workshop and demonstration
16:45–17:30 | MASH contemporary Morris
17:45–18:30 | The Way We Live improv dance performance
18:30–20:00 | Dinner break - bring a picnic and grab a drink – imagine you're on the Hoe!
20:00–21:45 | Swing Party! With live band and dancing
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Memory City Plymouth
Memory City will be presented in the form of narratives (still/moving/sound or text) consisting of user-generated content, user-generated interpretation, and documentary sources on the changing character and perception of public spaces in Plymouth.
The works will be sited within the city (shop windows/CCTV screens in shopping malls/interior of a public space e.g.: post office or pub) and a bus or walking tour (depending on proximity of sites) will be organised whereby invited groups are taken around the city, physically interacting with it. A tour guide with a script would encourage the participants to take part in several activities. By developing scenarios for the use of mobile phones the participants would respond to the surroundings they encounter.
