- Posted on June 19th, 2025
Full of Noises – Cultivating a Regenerative Culture Through Permaculture Design
This case study was written by Full of Noises – an experimental music hub championing sound art from Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. They outline their deep commitment to climate action and regenerative culture by embedding permaculture design, ethics, and principles across their entire organisation, focusing on Earth Care, People Care, Future Care and Fair Share to foster sustainable practices and holistic wellbeing in their programme.
The case study is one of over 50 practical examples of cultural organisations taking climate action including in depth case studies written for Arts Council England and Julie’s Bicycle’s Environmental annual report 2023-24. Check out the full interactive report here.
About Full of Noises
Full of Noises have always been committed to climate action, and when the redevelopment of our venue at Piel View House was completed by Leeds Environmental Design Associates in 2023, we sought to deepen this commitment by employing an Events and Programme Producer who would integrate climate action and sustainable practice at an organisational level.
Our new Events and Programme Producer, Amy Stretch Parker, is an Applied Permaculture Design Diploma Apprentice and uses permaculture design, ethics and principles to shape our programme and organisation. The ethics of Earth Care, People Care, Future Care and Fair Share are embedded in everything we do and considered at the design point of all activity, ensuring that environmentally sustainable practices, staff, artist and audience wellbeing, and social responsibility are core to our programme.
Full of Noises is all about experimentation and the development and celebration of new ideas around sound and music. It is important for us to invest in long term relationships with the place where we live and the people we work with, and so through the holistic practice of permaculture we can create an environment where creativity, artistry and nature can flourish. Think of our use of permaculture design as creating a fertile soil within which everything can grow!
Delving into Permaculture Design
One of the tools of permaculture design that we integrate into all of our work are ‘Zones’.
It all starts in Zone 0; what can we do to ensure the health and happiness of our staff? We regularly eat together, and share a mostly plant based diet, this minimises food waste and encourages healthy habits and we regularly engage in collaborative creative activities.
Zone 1 – the venue and the gardens. The venue already had a heat pump heating system in place and the redevelopment of Piel View House was done to high environmental sustainability standards, but this year we installed a wormery, compost bins and created a herb garden to recycle and minimise food waste. We now use environmentally sustainable consumables on site (cleaning, printing etc) and we’ve developed an area of ‘wild land’ on site to encourage biodiversity. Most of the workshops and drop in activities which we deliver on site focus on using recycled materials to engage people with sound and music such as our famous Spanner Gamelan which is a collaboratively played instrument made from spanners, pots and pans all sourced from charity shops and donations, and the Shaker Maker sessions which use recycled materials to create whacky and inventive instruments.
Zone 2 – the park and the people. By focusing our attention this past year on engaging hyperlocal audiences we have reduced the carbon footprint of those travelling to our gigs and events. We are working with local families to monitor the biodiversity of the park in a year long ‘Observe and Interact’ programme called The Listening Garden and we’ve developed a Musician’s Lab for local musicians who will make up a pool of artists who we can work with on a long term basis, again reducing the carbon impact of bringing artists in from outside of the area. We have also employed the services of local tradesmen to landscape the garden using locally sourced materials such as reclaimed Furness bricks to repair our 100 year old wall, and commissioned herb planters made by the inmates of Haverigg prison (Haverigg Social Enterprise).
Zone 3 – beyond the park. In 2023 we formed partnerships with other locally based, environmentally conscious artist-led organisations to help deliver our programme so we can continue to centre ecology and sustainability in our activities. Examples of this are the Cumbria Community Forest tree planting consultation project RAISE, Mycelium Thinking’s fungi sounds workshops, Playful Nature’s nature based songwriting workshops and our artist-led Listening Garden project. We have also hosted events at our venue for Cumbria Action for Sustainability and the local council’s Poverty Truth Commission, continuing our wider engagement with Earth Care and People Care centred communities. Internationally, we continue to be a partner in the Acoustic Commons network, developing practice around environmental audio streaming and listening.
By using the Zoning activity in our programming we have been able to engage a more diverse audience and have begun to develop a community of people invested in understanding and appreciating the biodiversity of our gardens and the park and the importance of nature and music connection for wellbeing and creativity.
By focusing her diploma designs on the activity at Piel View House, Amy will be able to dedicate Full of Noises as a Land Project with the Permaculture Association UK. In doing so we hope to encourage the wider permaculture community to engage with our organisation and its events, and to increase the opportunities for environmentally focused activities in the future such as volunteer days, workshops and celebrations.
More on The Listening Garden
Our community research project, The Listening Garden, is a year long project in partnership with Vision Support Barrow District, a local organisation who offer learning and engagement opportunities for families of visually impaired young people. The artist-led sound based sessions are run monthly at Piel View House and in Barrow Park and the young people and their families engage with and monitor nature through various listening activities.
So far we have been observing the birds in the park using the Merlin app, we had the artist David de la Haye deliver a sonic pond dipping session to listen and observe the plant and animal life in Barrow Park pond, and artist Lee Patterson looked at the relationship between weather, light and sound. We’ve monitored the moth and butterfly population using traps, listened to the sounds of compost and decay and hope to continue this project with bat detection, habitat creation (bird boxes and feeders, hedgehog homes, dead hedges) and the planting of a wildflower garden.
The data we collect from these sessions will be shared on iNaturalist/Merlin and we are building a map of the plant and animal life of the garden. The young people are co-designing our garden as an accessible space for visually impaired and neurodivergent people to observe and listen to nature which we hope will be completed in early 2025.
Reflections
One of Holmgren’s permaculture principles is Small and Slow Solutions, and we apply this to the impact of having Permaculture design at the core of our programme. Full of Noises has always been an ethically minded organisation and has, over the past 15 years, focused on sustainable practice and environmental responsibility. However, one of the main, but small impacts of implementing permaculture design principles on the team is the act of reflection as part of all project management.
Rather than a rushed afterthought, reflection has become a core process and we meet monthly to reflect on our work, the events we’ve delivered, and team wellbeing over lunch at a local cafe. These reflection sessions allow us to consider all aspects of our programme and to develop it accordingly using the permaculture tools. By continuing to mimic the patterns we find in nature in our programming, such as spirals, we are able to return back to the design process and expand again, growing with each activity that we deliver, gradually but continually improving in small and slow steps. Reflection allows us to notice the ripples we are making in the community, to see the people and the planet and how we affect them, it allows us to respond to feedback, to self regulate, to grow and to flourish. And permaculture allows us to see the bigger picture, not just the carbon footprint. We’re aiming for a regenerative culture at Full of Noises, not just a sustainable one.
One of the favourite reflections questions we use is “what was interesting or unexpected?”. Artist, audience and participant feedback is often framed in response to this. For example, the connections artists have made with other artists when we based them in self catering accommodation by the beach, rather than a hotel so that they had the opportunity to cook and share food together and take a walk, which resulted in the unexpected outcome of them deciding to work together. And the grandma of a young person who came to a Listening Garden workshop, who downloaded the Merlin app at our Birdsong session and has since started logging all the birds she finds in her garden daily, or the artist we commissioned to deliver a workshop around fungi who has since decided to switch her practice from writing to music because of her experience with us and the confidence it gave her to explore that side of her creativity. And sometimes it’s just being asked for recipes for the food that we make on site, or the photos of the amazing recycled materials instruments young participants have made at home after a Shaker Maker session.
And we have a pair of nesting sparrowhawks in our garden now, so there’s that!
Header image: Listening Garden, Credit: Full of Noises