Thoughts from Softer Centres

Bea, my teen, and I co-facilitated two workshops for autistic kids and families in Croydon’s Whitgift Centre, inside an epic (and very pink) temporary structure called Wiggle Wonderland.

We built dens.

…which is the most simplistic summary of events. For those who like it long-form, more details are below!

Kids like dens. They like lying down and looking up, rolling around, snuggling, nesting, and simply being: looking, breathing, listening, thinking.

Kids like imagining and what-if’ing and planning; they love organising, experimenting, testing, feeling and sensing. They like collaborating, demonstrating, sharing, and communicating.

And they also like documenting, particularly if they’re documenting something meaningful to them.

But not all kids like doing all these things all the time, in the same order, or in the same way. Given the freedom to explore, kids are intuitively drawn towards their own individualised best learning at that moment and know when that learning is complete.

Most of all, kids love celebrating – themselves and others who support them. They like building dens with their trusted adults, and adults benefit from building dens, too.

Our participants used words like ‘amazing’, ‘incredible’, ‘joyful’, ‘exciting’, and ‘magical’ to describe their experience. The most significant evaluation metric was that we got hugged. We always get hugged.

I don’t need to go into details about the duress, constraint and limitations of the world that most children – especially autistic children – are trying to navigate within a society that doesn’t value epic imagination and wild free play or embodied kinaesthetic hands-on learning; wonderful kids who are struggling to find themselves and their potential within a schooling system that demands that children conform, be small and still, and meet arbitrary targets.

Our workshops challenge this: they are huge in spirit, exuberant and embodied, and our materials are varied and abundant. We don’t do workshops for kids; we do workshops with them. We join in, sharing the magical moments as co-creators and conspirators.

I’d guess that some of our attendees had never had the opportunity to build a den so freely, especially not in a big space with rich, generous materials, without a pre-determined outcome, or an enormous cuddly rabbit.

If you do anything with a child this spring, especially a child you want to connect with, build a den. Most importantly, don’t build it for them; gather the materials, make space (and time!) and then let them lead and use you to make it with them as an assistant. Listen and enjoy.

Wiggle Wonderland is a timber-framed, touring art pavilion that can be adapted to display the works of artists and communities in different locations. Each installation is shaped by the people and place in which it arrives; collaboration and co-creation are core to the project.

The Wiggle came to Croydon in February 2025, residing in the Whitgift Centre for two weeks. Local children and young people designed banners exploring what they needed more of, what they wanted less of, what they cared about, and what had been overlooked.

In Softer Centres, we invited our participants to explore and soften the Wiggle pavilion with colourful fabrics and trimmings to construct a sensory-friendly space for our eyes, ears, and bodies. The children created soft, colourful spans between the pavilion posts using brightly coloured cohesive (self-adhesive) bandages. They then used these as a framework to hang and drape fabrics to create walls and roofs for little personal and shared den spaces, covering the floor with soft blankets.

We documented the process with pictures and drawings to create a ‘manifesto for a softer future’ that felt kind and more welcoming for autistic and neurodivergent Croydon residents.

We encouraged the children to describe their mini-worlds using sensory-rich language. We also had two digital cameras with integrated thermal printers to allow participants to document their creations and discoveries in a simple and immediate non-verbal way. The children could then add their printed images to a shared manifesto for a Softer Croydon.