NO CHOICE. NO FREEDOM. NO ESCAPE.
GOOD's Digital Designer Eleanor Bonsor [Egg] and Copywriter Beth Smith, share what it was like to work on Ben & Jerry’s latest piece of refugee activism.
“Have you thought about including a dead mouse?” Our Creative Director, Lee Boulton, said ponderously.
This isn’t the kind of feedback you generally expect to get as a Creative. But over our weeks working with Ben & Jerry’s and Conversation Over Borders to develop the No Escape Room, it became our new normal.
The context: anti-immigration chaos
Beth: This all started at the tail-end of summer 2025. The country had been whipped up into a frenzy about asylum hotels – with racially charged riots all over the UK. Some even taking place outside accommodation for children. Children.
Ben & Jerry’s and their partner, Conversation Over Borders, decided they wanted to clap back with something bold, and they asked us to help them do it.
An escape room with a twist
Egg: The No Escape Room was our solution. As you approach, you think you know what you’re in for: a pop-up ‘experience’, a light-hearted challenge.
On entry, you’re faced with a cramped room that appears lived in by an entire family. There’s peeling wallpaper and water damage. A window showing protestors outside. A stressful, overwhelming soundscape of doors banging and babies crying.
Beth: Using classic escape room touchpoints, we revealed the frightening details of real asylum seekers’ experiences. A curfew between 6pm and 5pm? No choice about what you eat, or who you share a room with? It’s all so horrible, it must be made up – all part of the game. Except it isn’t. And gradually, this truth becomes clear.
Egg: This was the crux of the idea; the dissonance between how exaggerated an experience the No Escape Room seems, and the horror that it isn’t exaggeration at all. And it really was the details that brought the idea to life and exposed this irony. A No Exit sign, the shadow of a family facing their ‘future’, riffs on confusing public notice leaflets.
Staying true to real stories
Egg: You hear heartbreaking accounts from the real voices of asylum seekers, whilst looking through a window onto people protesting their very existence. Asylum seekers are stuck in bureaucratic limbo, with far-right ideologies knocking on their door. Having escaped one horror; they’ve entered another.
Beth: In case it isn’t obvious, we got really obsessed with every detail here. And it was credit to the team at Ben & Jerry’s and Conversation Over Borders that we were able to keep it absolutely true to real experiences.
Egg: It was amazing to see the public’s interaction with the No Escape Room and validating to speak with some of the asylum seekers it had been based around. It was especially nice to see how engaged some of the younger passers-by were!
Beth: On the day of the pop-up in Truman Brewery near Shoreditch, we watched people closely as they responded to this brutal reality. They’d step inside slightly confused, unsure (understandably) about entering somewhere they apparently wouldn’t escape. But after a quiet five minutes inside the space, many people came out shocked, ready for conversation and eager to sign the petition.
It’s projects like this that prove to me the power of creative, and of strong collaboration, in shaking people up and getting them to listen.
