Garden City Manifesto Banners
Workshops with young people and the community to have a say in the design of the new Ebbsfleet Garden City in their neighbourhood.
The IGNITION that art can cause became tangible to me during a workshop I held for young people at Ebbsfleet Academy. We did Manifesto Writing and Banner Making with the idea to give them a voice in the development of the new Ebbsfleet Garden City. How would their ideal and most perfect outdoor space look and feel like? Their ideas and visions were put onto big and bold banner flags to create visibility: This is what WE want!
There was this young girl, rather quiet and shy, she liked to stay out of the business of the big shared tables and kept herself on the edge of the room.
But she was brewing up something amazing!
The brief had really landed with her and she came up with this beautiful design of hands. Her idea was a communal hand print wall for the new park where people would come together and leave their marks. She had lit up literally.
Her idea was so good that it became reality!
Cementfields, the organisation that runs these outreach art projects realised the wall as a pop-up for Ebbsfleet Fusion Festival in July 2022.
600 people came to leave their hand prints on it, it was a huge success.
The girl was then invited to speak about her experience at the Child in the City conference in Dublin and is now determined to become a designer or architect.
The materials from this workshop were given to the landscape architects working on the development and led them to alter their strategies for the public space in the area.
The Garden City Manifesto Flags were shown at the Whitstable Biennale in June 2022, they are currently on display at Gravesend Library alongside the Hand Print Wall and are due to be exhibited at Ebbsfleet International station this summer (2023).
This is the power art has! It inspires. It invites, it gives hope and courage. It enables self-expression and transforms thoughts and sometimes lives.
If this girl’s success is my legacy, I’m happy! I helped her to develop a vision for her future while thinking about her community.
It all happened within minutes, the initial spark that has likely changed the course of her life and inspired and included hundreds of other people. Bang! There it was, like a flash of lightning.
This is why I love art.
One of many reasons.
