Thomas Heatherwick's studio was selected by the British Government to design the UK Pavilion for the Shanghai 2010 World Expo. They designed the "Seed Cathedral", an enormous box measuring 15 by 10 metres, which was covered in 60,000 acrylic rods. Working with the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew Gardens, thousands of individual varieties of seeds were sourced from China’s Kunming Institute of Botany and cast into the tips of each of these acrylic rods. At night the seeds were backlit by LED lights embedded in the rods, while during the daytime the clear rods drew down sunlight so that the seeds acted as miniature stained glass windows, resulting in a serene, delicately illuminated interior.

Sir Andrew Cahn, Senior Responsible Officer in the Foreign Office for the Shanghai Expo, has said that World Expositions are about national branding, and from the start Heatherwick endeavoured to create a Pavilion that showed an unexpected and extraordinary aspect of Britain. As more people in the world would see the outside of the Pavilion than would visit its interior, the "Seed Cathedral" was designed to stand out by its visually distinctive exterior. The UK Pavilion ultimately won the Expo's gold medal for Pavilion design

After the Expo closed the Pavilion was dismantled and the seed rods dispersed. These 9 rod tips were given to the V&A by Mace Group, the company who managed the project. In 2013 a model of the British Pavilion was sold at auction in Shanghai for $215,000.

After completing his MA at the Royal College of Art, Thomas Heatherwick established the Studio in 1994, as a space in which to produce extraordinary projects. Rejecting conventional classifications, Heatherwick and his team explore the thresholds between standard design categories. Celebrating the pure joy of creating 3-dimensional forms, the Heatherwick studio has earned an international reputation for creating stunning and ingenious works that span a breathtaking array of disciplines: from architecture, furniture, product design and fashion, to engineering, sculpture, transport and urban planning. Heatherwick and his studio were the subject of an exhibition held at the V&A in 2012. The Museum also holds a model of Heatherwick's 2012 Olympic Cauldron that was especially made for the exhibition by Heatherwick Studio.