What is Wake The Tiger? The psychedelic ‘amazement park’ opening in Bristol this weekend

An immersive art experience aimed at protecting and restoring the natural world is set to open in Bristol this weekend.

Wake The Tiger, from the creators of the music festival Boomtown, is occupying a former warehouse in St Philip’s and has been dubbed as the first-ever “amazement park”.

Wake The Tiger’s creators said: "The driving force behind the idea is to inspire people to reconnect with their environment and the community.

"The aim is to create an experience of creativity, discovery and play which mixes lessons in science with spiritual messages about the planet."

When will the experience open?

Wake The Tiger is due to open on Saturday 30 July.

Lak Mitchell, the project’s creative director, said: “Wake The Tiger is an abandoned time capsule of fantastical experiences just waiting to be discovered.“

It will invite you to explore connections with the environment around you as well as challenge you to transform the world we all live in.”

We can’t wait for guests to explore what we have created in the heart of Bristol.”

What can you expect from the Wake The Tiger experience?

Artists, robotic experts, costume-makers, architects, videographers and prop-makers have all collaborated to make the fantasy landscape.

It takes the public on a journey through the parallel universe of Meridia, which is flooded with a constant stream of junk from our own world.

The story begins in a dismal housing development promising luxury living, where the only truly living thing is a solitary tree.

Visitors are then sucked into Meridia’s labyrinthine network of tunnels and dens, where thousands of knick-knacks line the walls as inhabitants try to make sense of the tat flowing in from Planet Earth.

The route passes through the “mycelium room”, the dense network of fungal threads vital to soil health and almost all plant life, before entering glades dense with huge, psychedelic flowers.

Twenty-seven different spaces branch off from the path, including dark forests, ice caves, and an eerie underwater world, populated by nightmarish mermaids and clogged with plastic.

The attraction is dotted with chambers and workshops belonging to the never-seen Meridians, which are full of levers and buttons that trigger a host of animatronic surprises.

The intense visual experience is accompanied by a dense soundscape, where the cacophony of a healthy ecosystem is interspersed with the sound of ticking clocks and clicking machinery.

Lak Mitchell added: “This is a vision that plays into and expands on everything we have spent our lives building, taking raw underground art and fusing it with the latest technology.“