Ticket to Antarctica

Ticket to Antarctica is a public engagement campaign from the British Antarctic Survey, the UK's national polar research centre. Each season, people sign up to send their name to Antarctica on board one of BAS's ships or planes, then follow the journey as it travels to Antarctica. Working with A Couple of Birds, I built and looked after the site across two seasons, in 2024 and 2025.

The site is a custom WordPress theme built around a library of ACF blocks, so the BAS team could publish journal entries, plane and station profiles, and campaign pages throughout the journey without needing a developer. The centrepiece is the journey tracker, an interactive map built with Leaflet, which plots the route and stops so followers can see exactly where their name has got to.

Sign-ups are connected to Mailchimp, so everyone who gets a ticket receives updates as the journey unfolds. A custom PDF generator allowed children, parents and teachers alike to print their tickets at home.

The audience is huge and varied, from curious families to whole classrooms. In 2025 we added a dedicated section for teachers, with curriculum-linked resources for Key Stages 2, 3 and 4, created with the Royal Geographical Society. With traffic spiking around launches and big moments in the journey, I kept the site fast, accessible and reliable, and made sure it worked just as well on a school laptop as on a phone.