The Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space Garden at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026

This post by Kate Binnie reports on a groundbreaking approach to creating space for reflection and conversation about respiratory ill health at the Chelsea Flower Show.

In communities disproportionately affected by deprivation and respiratory ill health, the legacy of mining and heavy industry, smoking-related disease, air pollution and occupational exposures (dust, chemicals) is compounded by healthcare inequalities and the inverse care law, whereby resources are often least available in areas of greatest need. For millions of people living with chronic lung conditions, the resulting breathlessness limits everyday life, undermining physical, psychological, social, financial and spiritual wellbeing.

Yet breathlessness remains remarkably difficult to talk about. People living with lung conditions often struggle to communicate their experience, while health professionals may lack the time, confidence or psychosocial resources to treat it as more than a lungs-and-brain "problem." Miranda Fricker describes this as hermeneutical injustice: "a significant area of experience obscured from understanding owing to prejudicial flaws in shared resources for social interpretation." In other words, when something cannot be communicated, it may be rendered invisible.

This is a phenomenon that my PhD research explored. Among the 50 patients and professionals I interviewed, experiences of shared understanding — what Hutchinson has called ‘Breathing Space’ were rare and challenging for all concerned within systems of care that do not provide the space and time to explore the breathless person's social, cultural and personal history. From a critical realist perspective, my analysis indicated not only gaps in interpersonal communication and at service level (epistemic injustices in themselves), but that these gaps are generated and sustained by deeper and persistent social, cultural and material conditions – what Alderson calls ’hostile absences’.

The Asthma + Lung UK Breathing Space garden, which has just won a silver medal at RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2026, emerged as a creative response to these experiences of restriction and absence. Drawing on findings from my research into how mind-body interventions help people living with lung conditions, the garden sought to embody their antonyms: space and presence.

Designed by my partner Angus Thompson in collaboration with patients and staff at the Breathing Space lung rehabilitation centre in Rotherham — where the garden is currently being rehomed —  the garden is grounded in a simple idea:  when we create even momentary conditions of safety and calm, the body can naturally find its own way back to easier breathing.

Inspired by the Japanese concepts of ma and yohaku no bi (the beauty of empty space and time), Angus translated empirically grounded ideas from my research into a design that reframes emptiness as possibility:  a calm, green space in which space, choiceful movement, reflection and connection become possible.

For us, the design team, the most striking aspect of the Chelsea garden was the conversations it made possible with hundreds (if not thousands, as 160,000 people visited the show this year) of visitors. One of our volunteers handing out leaflets for Asthma + Lung UK reflected:

There were people living with asthma, relatives of miners, and so many from Rotherham, Sheffield and the surrounding communities. The garden seemed to create an atmosphere of trust that encouraged people, especially men, to open up and share deeply personal experiences. I honestly couldn't believe how willing people were to connect and talk.

Design features such as the oxygen cylinders supporting the Breathing Space platform, the 6:4 breathing rhythm reflected in the fencing, the carbon-capture concrete, and the calming effect of the planting acted as unexpected conversation starters. Visitors frequently responded by sharing personal and family experiences of lung disease, loss, caring, hope, meaning and recovery. Respiratory professionals were equally enthusiastic, welcoming the rare visibility afforded to their often underfunded speciality and asking when they, too, might have a Breathing Space garden at their own hospital.

This matters because hermeneutical injustice is not only a problem of individual communication and epistemic asymmetry between patients and professionals in the clinical setting, but a problem of collective understanding which limits the potential of everyone concerned with lung disease. When experiences remain difficult to articulate, societies, institutions and healthcare cultures struggle to recognise, respond or make space for them.  We were delighted that for one week at Chelsea, a carefully designed garden could become a site of shared interpretation in which conversations about breathing, breathlessness, recovery and hope could be expressed and understood in new ways.

The garden is now relocated at the Breathing Space lung rehabilitation centre in Rotherham, where many of the ideas that shaped its design emerged through conversations with patients, families and staff. The garden is now under the ownership of the local community and is beginning a new life beyond Chelsea.

Acknowledgements

The garden was funded by Project Giving Back https://www.givingback.org.uk for Asthma + Lung UK https://www.asthmaandlung.org.uk

Designed by Angus Thompson https://www.angusthompsondesign.com and built by Dan Flynn.

Sculpture by Oliver Barratt https://www.oliverbarratt.co.uk

Rotherham Breathing Space https://www.therotherhamft.nhs.uk/patients-and-visitors/our-sites/breathing-space

Author bio

Kate is an HCPC registered music therapist with 20 years’ clinical experience in palliative care, based in Oxford. In 2016, she completed an MSc in palliative care from King’s College London funded by the Samuel Sebba Scholarship.  Kate is also a qualified yoga and mindfulness teacher and works with people with chronic and life-limiting conditions and their families into bereavement. She delivers training workshops for clinicians at www.sobelleducation.org.uk, and she is a guest lecturer on the MSc in Palliative Care at KCL and on the UK’s first PG training in Psycho-spiritual care at Oxford Brookes University. After 5 years as senior research associate on the Wellcome-funded Life of Breath project, Kate is now in the final year of her part-time PhD at the Wolfson Centre for Palliative Care Research at the Hull York Medical School funded by UKRI (i3) exploring the relationship between emotion regulation and breathlessness in advanced disease. 

Aesthetic Injustice, Epistemic Injustice, and Disability

Today's post comes from Professor Dominic McIver Lopes:

Aesthetic Injustice attempts to spotlight an overlooked variety of injustice. One way to get a fix on it contrasts it with what I call ‘weaponized aesthetics’. Another is to consider a case study of aesthetic injustice that targets disabled people. A nice feature of this case study is that it highlights the relationship between aesthetic injustice and epistemic injustice.

Cover for Aesthetic Injustice

Let’s start with the contrast between aesthetic injustice and weaponized aesthetics.

Weaponized aesthetics is well known to philosophers and other scholars. Unjust treatment of members of identity groups often harnesses stereotypes, some of which are propagated by elements of aesthetic culture, especially visual images and narratives. For example, some movies portray disabled people as helpless and pitiable – or as villainous. Buts of aesthetic culture serve as tools of social injustice.

An aesthetic injustice is a social arrangement that harms people in their aesthetic capacities, such as capacities to appreciate, make, curate, or collect. These capacities are exercised in social practices: Impressionism and social media memes are two different aesthetic practices. So, in aesthetic injustice, participants in aesthetic practices are harmed as makers, appreciators, and the like. Since harm is not sufficient for injustice, the book argues that harms are unjust when they cut against interests in the diversity or the autonomy of aesthetic practices.

That puts it all rather abstractly; an example would help. Consider tactile pictures used by blind people. That last sentence might surprise you. An impressive suite of studies by the Canadian psychologist John M. Kennedy showed that blind people correctly interpret drawings where raised lines trace objects’ contours. They can also make raised-line drawings, and some of Kennedy’s subjects figured out on their own how to render scenes in perspective. This came as a surprise not only to sighted people but also to blind people. Everyone had internalized a conception of vision and depiction that made the very idea of ‘tactile pictures used by blind people’ seem absurd.

The neglect of tactile imaging is arguably an aesthetic injustice. It harms blind people by depriving them of access to a field of aesthetic engagement in ways that cut against an interest in there being diverse imaging practices and also an interest in there being an imaging practice where blind people are at home. The argument is hardly simple; it must navigate some tricky obstacles. You’ll have to read Aesthetic Injustice for more details!

There’s something that the book doesn’t emphasize. Recall that an aesthetic injustice is a social arrangement that harms people in their aesthetic capacities. This account leaves opens the means by which aesthetic injustice is produced. One might think that the very idea of tactile pictures seemed absurd as a result of epistemic injustice, specifically what Miranda Fricker called ‘hermeneutical injustice’.

Hermeneutical injustice is not the same as aesthetic injustice. Distinguishing them equips us to study how they interact. As I write in the book, different kinds of unjust social arrangements ‘cling to each other like burrs’.

Dominic McIver Lopes FRSC is University Killam Professor at the University of British Columbia. He works mainly in aesthetics, and has published books on the meaning and value of images, new technologies in the arts, the nature of art, and aesthetic value. 

His most recent book, Aesthetic Injustice, was published by Oxford University Press in 2024.