Qualla: Eden Project

Eden Project: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit User:A1personage, Public domain. In 1981 the BBC needed a planet. They were filming The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and required a setting for Magrathea, the world that built worlds for the very rich. They found their alien landscape in a worked-out china clay pit near St Austell, a great white-grey scar in the Cornish earth. Twenty years later, on 17 March 2001, the same pit reopened as the Eden Project: two clusters of inflated geodesic domes housing rainforest and Mediterranean biomes, the largest such structures on Earth. The clay pit had spent 160 years yielding the white powder that glazes porcelain and coats paper. It would spend its next century yielding wonder.

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Image: User:A1personage | Public domain

Eden Project: The Pit That Built Itself

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian vernot, CC BY-SA 3.0. The site is still essentially a hole in the ground, 15 metres below the water table. When construction started in 1998, torrential rain flooded the pit and engineers had to install massive drainage systems before any building could happen. The biomes that rose from the floor were...

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Image: Julian vernot | CC BY-SA 3.0

Eden Project: Tim Smit's Garden

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rod Allday, CC BY-SA 2.0. The project was conceived by Tim Smit, the record producer turned garden restorer who had already rescued the Lost Gardens of Heligan a few miles east, and Jonathan Ball, an architect. Smit's idea was less a tourist attraction than a botanical argument: that we are all dependent ...

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Image: Rod Allday | CC BY-SA 2.0

Eden Project: Phyllotaxis and the Seed

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Martinvl, CC BY-SA 4.0. In September 2005 a third building opened alongside the biomes: the Core, an education centre with a copper roof shaped to the mathematics of plant growth. Grimshaw and the sculptor Peter Randall-Page worked out the geometry from phyllotaxis, the spiral arrangement of seeds in a ...

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Image: Martinvl | CC BY-SA 4.0

Eden Project: Africa Calling and Other Lives

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jon, CC BY 2.0. On 2 July 2005 the Eden Project hosted Africa Calling, the African concert in the Live 8 series staged around the world that day to put debt relief on the G8 agenda. Cornish choirs sing in the biomes regularly. The 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day used Eden as a location. The...

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Image: Jon | CC BY 2.0

Eden Project: The Eden Diaspora

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Calips assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0. The model travels. Eden Project Morecambe is planned for the Lancashire seafront, with biomes shaped like mussels and a focus on the marine environment, expected to cost 80 million pounds, with the first 2.5 million in UK government funding arriving in July 2024. Eden Project Dun...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Calips assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 3.0