Project Context Halton CCG, community engagement, health agenda, four artists
A new project in summer 2015, working to facilitate conversations about health and well-being in Halton with West Bank Academy.
We set off exploring the areas of West Bank to create a new self-guided walk leaflet to share with the community.
The project was commissioned by Halton CCG.
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Exploring new places is always exciting and this project has been no exception.
For me, walking the streets, the pathways and the open spaces of West Bank has revealed an unexpectedly green and surprising place. West Bank is intriguing, beguiling; busy and quiet, calm and frantic, staccato movements of people and wheels passing through the space. Explore more and there’s also a deep intensity of time past; some visible, some hinted at and some hidden beneath its present surface. The salt-blown air carries a rhythmic flow; a pattern of now, of then, and of a promising future.
Explore a place on your own and you get some sense of its way of life; a quiet, perhaps meditative view through your own senses, thoughts and ideas. Explore a place with a group of children and another adult and you encounter something very different; there’s less quiet, more shared conversation, a raised consciousness of others, of being together, encountering many layers of a place all at once and it’s so much more rewarding.
Together we spent time outside, wandering as well as walking with purpose to explore as much as we could. In the classroom we looked at maps of our walking route and other walk leaflets for ideas. We considered what was important about West Bank and how to share it.
The children extended their photography skills. They thought and wrote creatively about where they had been and what they had discovered. They identified plants and made drawings of them and designed their own walk leaflets.
We hope this gives you a sense of our exciting project, and we hope you enjoy exploring West Bank as much as we did.
Project Description St Marys Primary School, West Bank, Widnes. Walking, wandering, meandering meeting others - community engagement - church, cafe at spike island mapping, 8 weeks of workshops drawing plant identification photography skills collecting and pressing flowers map design print launch Links: Wandering the Green Ways walk