6th Aug 2026
Linmere’s new bandstand began with a simple ambition: to create a distinctive place for community performance, shaped by the community itself.
A bandstand is a place for people. It brings music, entertainment, shelter and everyday community life together. When we began thinking about a bandstand for Silver Birch Park, it was important that the finished design had a genuine connection to the people who will use it.
We commissioned public artist Tom Pearman to lead the design process. Much of Tom’s work explores the relationship between art, architecture and the built environment, often through collaboration with the very communities who will experience his art.
Turning sound into structure
The bandstand concept, Sound and Vision, takes its inspiration from the building blocks of sound: sine, square, sawtooth and triangle waves. These repeating waveforms determine how we hear pitch, harmony and tone. They also create strong visual patterns, giving the bandstand an idea that could work both musically and architecturally.
For the Linmere Delivery team, and the bandstand design team, local collaboration was central to the project, and that is where pupils from Thornhill Primary School and The Chiltern School made such an important contribution.
Listening to the Linmere community
Tom and the design team held creative sessions with pupils at The Chiltern School and Thornhill School. The first invited the pupils to imagine the bandstand as a “sound machine”. Pupils explored the shapes they found on radios, amplifiers and speakers—dials, switches, circles and repeating patterns—to help inform the design team on shape and structure.
Pupils preparing their visuals for the design project.
The second workshop explored the experience of listening. Pupils recorded familiar sounds associated with parks and play: balls bouncing, bicycles, cricket and badminton equipment, a skateboard, a crumpled crisp packet and even the mechanical noises made by outdoor gym equipment.
Pupils capture the sounds they hear in parkland spaces.
The design team transformed these recordings into visible sound waves. Playing them at different speeds revealed new shapes and patterns, helping pupils see the connection between an everyday noise and the visual language developing around the bandstand.
Pupils explore the patterns in the sounds waves from the ‘park sound’ recordings.
Sculpturing steel through sound
The outputs from the school creative sessions helped the design team build a vision for the Sound and Vision concept, from its earliest ideas through design, planning, fabrication and installation. The ambition was to create something beautiful to experience and behold, whilst functional, lasting and firmly rooted in Linmere.
The result is more than a conventional covered stage. Its design makes sound visible, translating waveforms into a piece of public art that can also host music, performance and other community activities. It gives Silver Birch Park a distinctive focal point while reflecting what a bandstand is there to do.
The video captures some of this journey, from the school creative sessions to the final installation, with some of the actual recordings made by the pupils who took part.
A collective piece of Linmere
Projects like this involve many stages and many people. From setting the initial brief and finding the right artist to coordinating engagement, refining the design, securing planning approval and overseeing delivery, whilst keeping the ambition at the heart of each decision. There have been some very dedicated team members who made this all possible.
The Sound and Vision bandstand is a lasting artwork and a practical community space, connected to local communities who helped shape it. It contains design ideas sparked in classrooms, sounds captured in playgrounds, in collaboration with those who will grow up around Silver Birch Park and see their input for decades to come.
We hope everyone will enjoy the new bandstand, and it becomes a focal point for living in Linmere. We also hope the story behind it continues to get told; how our local school children gave their time and inspiration to build a beacon to their creativity.
In addition to the video, you can find out more about Tom Pearman’s bandstand commission and explore the pupils’ workshops and sound recordings on the project website.
Linmere is designed to be a place for communities that embraces the natural environment, and where all generations can enjoy a great quality of life. This exciting new collection of leafy and walkable neighbourhoods, situated north of Houghton Regis Bedfordshire, located close to M1 Junction 11a. Nestled into verdant surroundings, its first homes completed and inhabited in 2021. The Land Trust will maintain and preserve these spaces on behalf of Houghton Regis Management Company.
