The Crown Estate
Who Else Lives Here? is a biodiversity living wall in the heart of central London, created for The Crown Estate, that turns a working construction hoarding into a thriving wildflower meadow — and a public window onto the wildlife quietly sharing the city with us.
Wired with sensors and machine learning, the wall listens for bats, watches for pollinators and counts the species moving through it — inviting thousands of passersby to notice the multispecies community on their doorstep. Because people only protect the nature they can see.
The Brief
The Crown Estate set out to find new ways of bringing nature — and people's attention to it — into one of the most built-up corners of the country. Through an open innovation call run with The Conduit, we joined forces with Vertical Meadow and forager Miles Irving to transform a Spring Gardens construction hoarding into a living meadow, just steps from Trafalgar Square. Our part of the brief was the hardest to see. A wall can look green and still be ecologically empty, so we were asked to prove that real, thriving biodiversity was colonising it — and to make that hidden life visible, credible and genuinely engaging to the people walking past every day.
The Solution
We designed and built the wall's sensing and data layer: a small, low-cost array of bee monitors, insect camera traps, a timelapse camera, and acoustic and bat detectors, paired with machine-learning models that identify the species moving through the meadow as they come and go. That intelligence feeds a web app connected to QR signs on the wall, with a public-facing Lab dashboard and species Logbook, where anyone can meet the hoverflies, ladybirds, solitary wasps and pipistrelle bats living metres from The Mall. The outcome is more than one wall. It's a working blueprint for biodiversity monitoring cheap and compact enough to sit on any construction site — a step toward a future where sensors mapping urban nature are as common as weather stations.
Coming soon
This case study is coming soon. Please check back when it’s complete to learn more about our impact.