A London jewellery designer with no landscaping background has created New Balance’s first factory garden – a space built purely for the 300 workers who hand-make its UK footwear, not for customers or press.
New Balance has opened its first corporate garden at the Made in UK factory in Flimby, Cumbria, giving roughly 300 workers who hand-produce the brand’s domestic footwear line a dedicated space to step away from the production floor. The Flimby Garden was designed by London jewelry house Bleue Burnham, marking the studio’s first professionally designed landscape project.
The Flimby factory has produced New Balance’s Made in UK range since 1991 and turns out about 30,000 pairs a month; the brand has invested in the site for more than four decades. The garden sits alongside the factory and was conceived strictly as staff space, not as a public or retail-facing amenity. Seating areas and communal gathering points sit among undulating flower beds, pockets of water and flowering cherry trees, with custom multicolored bird boxes integrated into the planting to support local wildlife.
Design magazine Wallpaper points to a broader body of research linking workplace green space to lower stress, improved cognitive function and gains in creativity and productivity. In that framing, the garden is more than a landscaping gesture for a brand that maintains rare dual domestic manufacturing in both the UK and the US. Wallpaper also reports that the garden has already drawn local birds, bees and a resident stoat family, and that some factory employees took part in the planting.
The garden was designed by Bleue Wickham-Burnham, founder of Bleue Burnham, who had been in separate talks with New Balance about a collaboration when their background as an amateur gardener (a passion Wallpaper traces to teenage years in East Sussex) emerged as the starting point for the project. Founded in 2018, Bleue Burnham is a London-based jewelry brand whose work explores the relationship between people and the natural world, pairing that theme with playful design and classic craftsmanship.
