Kin by Nettie CIC

Connection

Belonging

Come as You Are.

Kin by Nettie creates inclusive, sensory-led experiences that invite people to connect with self, community and heritage through movement, story and shared experience.

Kindred
Embodied, sensory heritage experiences for all. Through installations such as our beautiful Salt-Apothecary, Landscape Archaeology, Sensory Stories and more....

Little Kin
Babies and families connecting with museums, heritage and cultural spaces through movement, play and care.

Thrive Kin has now retired, making space for the next chapter of Kin.

Rooted in the belief that connection — to body community, land and memory — matters.

Beyond the Screen: taking embodied learning to Bletchley Park

In September 2026, I spoke at the GEM Conference at Bletchley Park about a question that sits right at the heart of Kin:

What happens when we think about museum learning through the body?

My talk, Beyond the Screen: What Babies Teach Us About Learning in a Digital Museum Age, began with babies.

Before babies understand labels, interpretation panels or digital interactives, they learn through movement, touch, balance, sound, repetition, proximity and relationship.

They reach. Turn. Mouth. Wobble. Watch. Retreat. Come back.

And adults don't stop learning this way.

Drawing on Little Kin, my heritage practice and my MA in Archaeology, I explored what changes when we stop treating learning as something that happens primarily in the head — and start thinking about people as whole, embodied learners.

That means asking different questions.

Not simply “How do we explain this?”

But:

What can someone touch, notice, hear, feel or explore?

Where can they choose to go?

Can they step away and come back?

What makes a space feel like somewhere they belong?

And perhaps most importantly: what happens when we trust people to make their own meaning?

I delivered the talk without PowerPoint. Because sometimes the way we communicate an idea is part of the idea itself.

Bletchley didn't feel like the end of this piece of work. It opened up more conversations — about embodiment, access, belonging and how museums might design learning around the ways people actually encounter the world.

Those conversations are continuing.

And so is Kin.

Have you sent or received one of our postcards?

Enter Community Prize Draw Here

The register for our Free Community Prize Draw Click the green button above.

The winner shall win Mystery Kin Parcel

Sometimes the smallest things can make the biggest difference.

Our Mystery Kin Parcels are carefully assembled collections of beautiful and tactile surprises inspired by health, heritage and belonging.

Open slowly. Explore with curiosity. Share if you choose. Tag us in your photos!

If you didn't get a postcard - blow it! You're here now - go on eneter!

Draw at the end of September.

Kin by Nettie — Festival of Archaeology 2026

We wondered what archaeology could feel like. So we tried it.

For the Festival of Archaeology 2026, Kin by Nettie created three very different invitations to encounter the past.

With support and guidance from the Council for British Archaeology (CBA), we developed our Festival programme as a case study, exploring what community archaeology can look like when participation, curiosity and belonging shape the experience from the beginning.

Their support gave us space not simply to deliver events, but to experiment, reflect and learn from what happened.

And we did a lot of experimenting.

We went into the woods. We gathered in a 19th-century railway inn. We filled a science museum with salt, stories, strange ingredients and an apothecary where curiosity mattered more than getting the “right” answer.

At Wild Spirit Woods, Kindred: Stories in the Woods brought archaeology into the landscape through making, storytelling and exploration.

At the historic Gibbet Railway Inn in Helsby, archaeology uncovered extraordinary stories beneath a familiar place.

And at Catalyst Science Discovery Centre, Salt of the Earth transformed local industrial heritage into a sensory apothecary of chemistry, objects, ingredients and human stories.

People touched things. Made things. Smelled things. Asked questions. Told us things we didn't know.

Babies joined in. Children chose their own paths through the activities. Adults got curious too.

There was no single way to participate and no predetermined thing everybody had to take away.

Somewhere along the way, the Festival became an experiment of its own.

What happens when we create the conditions for people to notice, wonder, choose and connect — and trust them with what happens next?

We're still following that question.

That’s Kin.