Wake The Tiger opened to the public on July 30 in the St Phillips area of Bristol. The immersive art experience comprises 27 different environments designed by the creative minds that make the Boomtown festival such a feast for the senses each summer in Winchester, Hampshire.
Here, in his own words, Graham MacVoy, Wake The Tiger’s managing director and co-founder, takes us through the portal into the world of Meridia.
Wake The Tiger’s festival roots
You don’t just come up with something like Wake The Tiger overnight. Chris Rutherford and Lak Mitchell, the founders of Boomtown, always had their eye on a permanent attraction. COVID gave us an opportunity to focus more on it because we weren’t caught up in that intense cycle of festivals.
Delivering music festivals has been my bread and butter for the past decade, but there’s not much I haven’t done. After leaving university I went and lived in the Alps for 10 years and built snowboard and ski events. When I came back to the UK, obviously there was not quite so much snow. So I did some skate events before getting into festivals and then joined Boomtown about five years ago.
Chris and Lak’s background was in the free party scene, where you’d have lots of venues, people rolling up with sound systems; a mêlée of people all over the place. That’s why there are so many micro venues and crews at Boomtown. They came up with this world, a whole city of streets and districts. And it worked. For the first six or seven years, it doubled in numbers every year to the point that it’s become this behemoth, with a licence for 77,000 people.
Boomtown gets its own building
Whilst it has a reputation for drum & bass and the big headliners, there are so many different musical genres at Boomtown. The wonderment of walking around the site is quite something. We call it a living theatre, a cross between a music festival, film set and theatre. And a theme park I suppose.
That’s what we’ve been able to tap into with Wake The Tiger, with all these artists, scenics, carpenters and great minds we’ve pulled together to help us build this.
Circus of Boom, the holding company for Boomtown, owns the building we’re in now. We’ve built a lot of festival sets here and had some crew parties. Then, in November 2019 we did four Area 404 club nights, named after one of the districts at Boomtown. These were successful, but we wanted to do something more creative.
We’ve had a lot of people grateful that something like this is in Bristol, not in the middle of London.
The experience
After buying your tickets to Wake The Tiger, you receive an email from Meredith Dean, the CEO of Meridia Luxury Homes, inviting you to view the new development of luxury apartments. On the day you arrive, you are met in the marketing suite by staff from Meridia Luxury Homes, some of the immersive actors we have in the attraction.
“We create streamlined luxury living focusing on affordability through smart space refinement and thinking inside the box,” says Meredith. “Less is more”.
Effectively they’re trying to sell you a tiny apartment, which they’re passing off as luxury. However, it is not all as it seems. Visitors discover the development is stalled because of an ancient tree that has been discovered in the middle of one of the buildings and they’re struggling to remove it.
Once on the development site, you stumble across one of the workers. He is convinced there is something up with the tree, but nobody else is privy to the glitches and messages he hears on his radio. It seems to suggest that the entrance to the development has become a portal between parallel worlds.
You then enter the portal through the tree, which opens up into a street scene and the world of Meridia. You learn a little about the four guilds – Air, Earth, Fire, and Water – which play an important part in the story.
Going deeper into the Wake The Tiger journey
When you’ve finished exploring, you go through a door marked Sorting Office and into the dream factory. This is where the journey goes even deeper and you venture into the abandoned factory filled with experiments. There are interactions, soundscapes, poems, and hidden digital art.
At the exit, you get a chance to answer some questions which determine which of the guilds you become a member of. Visitors are given a QR code, which takes them to their guild page. They are now guild-aligned. In the future, there will be opportunities to get more involved via challenges, activities and maybe even guild parties. You leave through the temple, which brings the nations of the guilds together and presents the fifth element.
Visitors are free to discover Meridia at their leisure. You select a slot when you book. These are available every 15 mins during opening hours. You can go round it again, or back to a different scene, if you wish. Different people take the exploration to different levels, some going right through the experience more than once, while others relax in our café/bar area.
Choosing the name
We’re now open, but the experience will never be finished. It’s got to keep evolving. There are tons of bits we’re excited about adding. A lot of it will be narrative-based.
One of the most stressful things was coming up with the name. We had a name originally, Cuckoo Ka Choo, but it was a nightmare for me to say as a Scotsman. So I said, “Guys, we’ve got to change the name.”
A lot of our ethos is about positive change. After six weeks of making lists of words, Lak’s wife, a trauma therapist, said, “What about Wake The Tiger?” Waking the tiger is effectively bringing the best out of you, to make the world a better place. It’s a bit out there, but we went with it, and I like it.
Photo, food and merchandise opportunities
Wake The Tiger is definitely Instagramable. We haven’t got spaces where we tell people where to take their photos, but it’s beautiful, different and well lit. I can’t see why you wouldn’t want to photograph it.
We’re really pleased we held off launching the merch until September. Having seen people go through the attraction there are certain things, particularly Meridia Luxury Homes and our Smøg ovens, that are proving very popular. There will definitely be some Smøg oven gloves coming soon. Our staff have created some amazing brands!
When it comes to food and drink, we’ve got a fantastic offering from some top chefs, with a lot of small plates. The food is made fresh on-site, offering delicious vegetarian and vegan options, as well as cakes, coffees and a fully-stocked bar.
Funding the Tiger
Last August we commissioned five test rooms and the cafe so we could bring investors down to show them what we were trying to do. Selling a concept that people hadn’t seen before was not the easiest of sales. However, once people saw it come to life it was an easy decision for them.
We got some money and that allowed us to start building. We also crowdfunded on Crowdcube and were oversubscribed with 750 investors. I’m really looking forward to engaging with them.
Crew-wise pretty much everyone came from Bristol, from our team, extended network and via socials.
I have had some interesting conversations with people in the attractions industry and am looking forward to a greater level of participation, just as I’ve had in the festivals and events sector.
Launching the Tiger
It was an intense build, but we got there. We had hoped to open a month earlier, and it certainly wasn’t a dream to open Wake The Tiger two weeks before Boomtown. But we were adamant that we had to be open for the summer holidays. If we didn’t open before Boomtown, when would we open? October?
What a time to open a business though. In a pandemic, and with all the uncertainty around Brexit and the cost of living crisis. But so far, so good. We’ve had plenty of sold-out days already. I like to think that we are affordable at £18.50 for a one to two-hour cultural experience. And we’ve got off-peak pricing as well.
Positive feedback for Wake The Tiger
We have had an incredibly successful first month of trading with sales targets being smashed and 5 star reviews everywhere. We are very excited about what the future holds.
There was one person who said they wanted to see it and, having been, wanted to come back and would happily pay more. One of the first guests was in a wheelchair. After they’d gone round the attraction, they went to find one of my ops managers. They were almost in tears because they said they did not feel they had missed anything. That was very rewarding. We have tried our best to make it as accessible as possible.
During the day we are getting kids, schools, and families. We’ll also be doing events in the evening for adults. We’ve created something that, it doesn’t matter what age you are, you leave going, “Wow, that was incredible.”
We are excited for people to come visit us in Bristol and experience the world of Meridia!
Graham MacVoy will be sharing more experiences from Wake The Tiger during a session on new UK attractions at IAAPA Expo Europe in London on 14 September.
Images courtesy of Andre Pattenden
