Wyre Council secured Welcome Back Funding to develop two new location-based interactive trail experiences for the borough, a digital heritage trail through the historic market town of Garstang, and an AR art trail along the seafront at Cleveleys linking the sculptures of Broadbent Studio, the Mythic Coast community memory trail and the open-source storybook The Sea Swallow.

Both trails needed to work on visitors' own smartphones, reach new and existing audiences, and connect people more deeply to the places and stories they were already walking through.

Core Narrative Development | Digital Trail Development | AR Experience Design | Content Development | Community Engagement | Ci Platform

For the Garstang Heritage Trail, we worked with local historian Paul Smith, who has spent decades collecting the memories of older residents and weaving them into his guided tours of the town, to get under the skin of a place whose most compelling stories rarely make it into official histories.

The trail captures something of Paul's particular gift: finding the human detail inside the historical record and making it feel immediate, local and genuinely surprising.

We published the trail on our Ci platform as part of the wider Discover Wyre Trails project, with content designed to invite audiences to return, to festivals, events and the town's arts centre, as well as explore.

For the Cleveleys Mythic Coast AR Art Trail, we worked with sculptor Stephen Broadbent and artist Hannah Megee to transform the existing seafront sculptures and the Sea Swallow storybook into interactive 3D media and AR art pieces.

The storybook had been conceived from the outset as an open-source project, every element placed under a Creative Commons licence and designed with deliberate gaps, inviting communities to extend and reinterpret it.

We used LiDAR scanning and photogrammetry to create detailed 3D digital models of the sculptures, which became the foundation for the AR artworks and trail experiences.

The knowledge held by local historians like Paul Smith is among the most valuable and most fragile cultural resource a community possesses, collected over decades through personal relationships, carried in living memory, and at constant risk of being lost entirely.

Digital trails of this kind are not just visitor experiences. They are acts of preservation, capturing voices and stories before they disappear and placing them back in the landscape where they belong, accessible to anyone who walks through it.

The Sea Swallow demonstrated something we believe strongly across all our place-based work: the most resonant local stories are the ones that hold joy and loss simultaneously.

The open-source model, intentionally designed with gaps for communities to fill, is also a model for how location-based storytelling can grow and evolve long after the initial project period ends.

Client: Wyre Council

TGA: Core Narrative Development, Digital Trail Development, AR Experience Design, Content Development, Community Engagement, Ci Platform

Partners: Four Door Productions (AR Development), Stephen Broadbent Studio (Sculpture), Hannah Megee (Storybook and AR Artwork), Paul Smith (Local History, Garstang)