Musician Hayden Thorpe is releasing a location-triggered soundtrack that will allow listeners to hear music that can only be heard inside the Wetlands

By Marco Marcelline

The reservoirs and reedbeds of Walthamstow Wetlands have long been a quiet refuge for indie musician Hayden Thorpe.

Now, the former Wild Beasts frontman is turning his fondness for the urban nature reserve into something entirely new: a location-triggered “sonic map” that will allow visitors to experience an album that can only be heard inside the wetlands.

Launching on Friday 20th March, the project invites visitors to put on headphones, connect to a digital map on their phone, and walk. As they enter different areas of the wetlands, music will gently bleed into their ears – with each reservoir unlocking a different piece of Thorpe’s new soundtrack.

“We’re used to organising music in time – track one, track two, track three,” Thorpe says, “but this is organised in geography. We’re sequencing the music by map location rather than by minutes.”

The idea is simple but radical: you cannot properly hear this album unless you are physically there. “It gives people a lens with which to see the magic of a place,” he explains.

“A pylon can either be a huge lump of steel – or it can be a giant upon which a peregrine is resting. Sometimes you need a hand to witness a place as it really is.”

Around ten songs, one for each reservoir, will form what Thorpe describes not as an album, but a “soundtrack”.

Speaking about his recording process he says: “It’s funny. You start out with expectations of what you’re going to make. But once you submit to what the wetlands say to you, it takes on a life of its own.”

Thorpe has lived in and around Walthamstow for 15 years. Originally from Cumbria, he moved to the area after spotting a “big bunch of green” on a map of London.

“I felt like I could probably get by in London if I had proximity to that space – being Cumbrian, I needed that expanse and that horizon to feel sane.”

When the wetlands opened to the public in October 2017 – after more than a century and a half of being closed off as a working reservoir site – it was, he says, a “eureka moment”.

Since then, the space has become both sanctuary and creative wellspring – a place to think, and begin shaping ideas that would later become songs.

Thorpe first found success as lead singer of indie pop band Wild Beasts, releasing five albums and earning a Mercury Prize nomination before the band played their final headline shows in 2018.

Since then, he has built a solo career, dropping his debut album Diviner in 2019, before 2021’s Moondust For My Diamond.

2024’s Ness, created in collaboration with nature writer Robert Macfarlane and inspired by the old military testing site Orford Ness in Suffolk, marked a shift away from purely personal songwriting.

“Up until that point, I’d predominantly been concerned with my own story. But surely there’s a conversation to be had about the wonder and richness of the outside world.”

The wetlands project continues that evolution – but in a way that feels deeply personal. In the wetlands, sirens, pylons and machinery exist alongside migratory birds and ancient reedbeds.

That duality is central to both the music and an accompanying three-month exhibition at the Engine House from March.

“The wetlands is this magical wild space marooned in a city of ten million people. The ancient songbirds you hear exist alongside incredible progress and machinery. It’s happened so quickly that we’re still reckoning with it.”

Rather than casting judgement on what is “natural” and what is “inorganic”, the exhibition explores the harmony and dissonance between them.

“You have to be as intrigued by the sound of a siren as the sound of a god-wit,” Hayden says. “Those two create a strange harmony.”

The exhibition will run at the Walthamstow Wetlands Engine House from Friday 20th March for three months. To access the sonic map, you just need to access the website via information that will be available at Engine House

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