Outdoor Culture CIC is a not-for-profit company that connects people with landscape and natural heritage through the arts, learning and play.

As its Director, my aim is to create new and imaginative experiences of green spaces by bridging the arts, education and environment sectors, generating brilliant new reasons for all kinds of people to spend time outside of buildings and to enjoy the real world.

I am interested in how human artifice can draw upon, reflect and locate itself within the wider ‘natural’ world of which we are a product. As indoor culture takes us further and further away from the land that sustains us, so there is a corresponding opportunity to reach out with purpose and imagination for the realities beyond our walls; to measure ourselves against the non-human; to experience and communicate our place in the world.  We are still wild creatures.

I am much influenced by the work of Richard Louv in identifying nature-deficit disorder as the root cause of much depression, obesity and behavioural problems in the western world.  Children have borne the brunt of a sudden social shift that has seen the loss of outdoor play and a profound disconnection from the environment of our evolution: when wildlife and food production are alien and remote, we are out of our element.  This disconnection also represents a barrier to environmental stewardship, because people can only value and protect what they know and love.   

However, away from our cars and buildings, the UK is a beautiful and uncrowded country. My work is to immerse children and families in green spaces; to help artists to question, provoke and transform; to help people discover their own wildness and explore our stunning natural heritage through all the tools that culture in the outdoors can offer.

I come to outdoor culture with 14 years of professional experience in arts and learning, gained through the Asian Music Circuit, Youth Music, Creative Partnerships, Arts Council England and as a freelance consultant. I am a musician and a hill-walker, based in the Chilterns AONB (Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty) in Buckinghamshire, South East England.

Alistair Will, Outdoor Culture