The ‘D-Day 75 Garden’ is our third collaboration with designer John Everiss and our fourth year contributing to projects at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show. We manufactured the master figures for five life-size sculptures, as well as four steel wave structures.

Commissioned by the D-Day Revisited charity as part of their 75th anniversary, the garden aimed to involve visitors in a reflection on the intense experiences endured by the veterans on D Day. Using 3D scans, we manufactured the master figures for each of the five different figures, machining them from polystyrene on our large volume 5 Axis CNC machine. They were then sprayed in a fire-proof hardcoat, providing John Everiss with a template around which to weld together thousands of individual metal washers. The effect was to create fluid, semi-transparent human forms that appear to emerge, struggling, through the slate-filled steel waves.

Both waves and figures were created with longevity in mind as the garden has since been permanently relocated to the British Normandy Memorial overlooking Gold Beach near Arromanches in France.