A Silver Medal and the Young People’s Choice at RHS Chelsea

Blast EcoShield exhibited at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show in May 2026 and came away with two awards. The Royal Horticultural Society gave the exhibit a Silver Medal. The RHS Young Reporters gave it the GreenSTEM Young People’s Choice Award, which goes to the GreenSTEM exhibitor whose stand most engaged them.

The second one matters more than it looks. Everything else we can point to comes from inside the defence and engineering world: four years of experimental work at Cranfield University, and a team and advisory board that ran the British Army’s explosive engineers and led the United Kingdom’s bomb disposal profession. That evidence answers whether an EcoShield works.

It does not answer the question a council, a venue operator or a developer asks second, which is whether the thing will look like security equipment parked in a public space. A horticultural audience looked at it and picked it out.

Neither award says anything about blast performance, and we would not claim otherwise. What they say is that the exhibit read as landscape to people who spend their week judging landscape. That is the premise the whole thing rests on.

Cranfield University’s press release of 22 May 2026 records both awards.