Gustav’s Time Travelling Adventure
“To blend the historic, political, poetic, musical and geographic in such an imaginative way is truly remarkable. We left with an even greater appreciation for our local community and its history.”
Type: Immersive Trail / Public Heritage Game / Mixed Reality
Location: London, UK
Role(s): Creative Direction, Narrative Design, Experience Design, Sound Design
Format: App-led trail feat. actors, installations, sound & live activations
Year: 2022
Gustav’s Time Travelling Adventure was a three-day immersive heritage trail designed to re-activate a London high street post-lockdown. Blending fictional storytelling with real local history, the trail followed Gustav – a Victorian goat inventor who becomes trapped in the future after a meteor crashes into his time machine.
Commissioned by Stanley Arts with support from Historic England, the project combined physical and digital play elements to invite the community to rediscover the high street’s architectural, political and cultural heritage.
Experience Design
Participants navigated the trail through an app-led narrative, animated clues, live actors, sound installations and site-specific interventions. The story connected real historical figures and events to the journey of Gustav, echoing the legacy of local inventor William Stanley.
To support Covid accessibility, the trail also included:
A livestream version for remote audiences
A printed booklet for visitors without smartphones
All costumes and set were produced sustainably in partnership with Work Play Scrapstore using repurposed materials.
Historical Characters & Sites
The adventure revealed stories from prominent local figures including:
Local suffragists
Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Clues and interactions were embedded within real public spaces and small businesses, encouraging participants to engage physically with the high street.
Key Moments
The trail included playful, escape-room style and multi-modal interactions such as:
Clues baked into cakes inside independent shops
Artefacts hidden in tree trunks in local parks
Keys hidden inside businesses to unlock chained suffragette protestors
Coleridge-Taylor teaching the art of conducting to participants during live performance segments
Participants were encouraged to look up at buildings, notice architectural details, and reflect on layers of political, artistic and social history within their environment.
Impact & Engagement
The project ran for three sold-out days with 300+ participants.
From participant feedback:
71% of respondents gave the highest possible score when asked if the trail made them feel more connected to the local heritage.
The work successfully:
Re-activated local cultural participation post-lockdown
Boosted footfall to independent high-street businesses
Enabled multi-generational engagement (significant family attendance)
Demonstrated the potential of mixed-reality heritage storytelling
“All the characters were fantastic; very engaging, in brilliant costumes and interactive. The actors really added something special and a favourite for the kids was Samuel Coleridge Taylor letting them conduct”
“It was so inspiring and fun it made me so happy and it felt so good to hang out with my friends and I really hope there will be more”
