When the collaboration between New Balance and jewellery brand Bleue Wickham-Burnham was announced, plenty of people assumed an accessories collection was on the way, something to customise and dress up your sneakers. But this time the two brands decided to surprise everyone, unveiling not a mass-market product, but a landscape project dedicated to the people who work every day to make New Balance what it is.

On 30 July, New Balance unveiled The Flimby Garden, the first-ever green space designed for the workers at its Made in UK factory in Flimby, Cumbria — the site where, for more than thirty years, around three hundred people have hand-produced roughly 30,000 pairs of sneakers a month. It was designed by Bleue Wickham-Burnham herself, founder of the London-based jewellery brand Bleue Burnham, marking her first-ever professionally designed project on a landscape scale.

In this project, the same sensibility that usually shapes a piece of jewellery around the relationship between body and nature has shaped an outdoor space around the relationship between person and landscape. The result draws directly on its surrounding territory, the Lake District, featuring gently undulating flower beds, wildflower planting, small pockets of water and flowering cherry trees, in a design that alternates structured forms with more playful, freer elements — including a series of multi-coloured bird boxes, designed to support local wildlife and signed with the same aesthetic language that defines Bleue Burnham‘s jewellery.

The central theme, openly stated by Dan Holtby, the brand’s Director of UK Manufacturing, is restorative design, aimed at creating a space designed not to entertain or to communicate, but simply to allow for a pause, a moment away from the production line.

The garden will remain a space exclusively for the factory’s employees, staying true to a project that shifts the focus from the finished product to the craftsmanship behind it.