It was good to meet all of those who attended, Lottie described the project aims and made contact with a wide variety of locally active people. It was especially good to talk to: local resident Rose, who suggested that young people have a much bigger investment in building projexts and new construction when they help built it themselves, Gary from Theatre Venture, Betty who runs the ASTA youth project and young people who she works with, Patrick Murphy Newham Cllr, Roger Ayrton Newham, Bobby Kensah from Norton Rose and Gary from the Royal Docks learning and activity centre.We are very much hoping they will come along to the creative activities we are running as part of the Active Community event on Saturday the 19th March at Britannia Village Hall 3-6pm.
Leaps of Imagination at Drew Primary School
On February 15th, we delivered our first session with 30 bright and inspiring Year 5 pupils in Drew Primary School. We were very impressed with their map reading skills, the wild and wonderful ideas they had for being joyful in the streets, and their ideas for how to make the new playable landscape under the DLR on the North Woolwich Road an exciting place that they and their siblings will want to play.The session began with an introduction to the ways Ashley and Lottie work and a short discussion on what art can be. We looked at the map of the locality and children proved that they are experts on their local area. When asked about their perceptions of the area under the DLR currently, they described it as
"Cold", "Grey", "Freaky", "Echoey", "Smelly", "Scary" and "Noisy"
The pupils considered the ways they already use the streets and public spaces in ways that are joyful and creative without the use of swings, slides or other conventional playground equipment and we discovered that they have many funny, adventurous and playful activities they like to do as they move from A-B. The children came up with many ideas. We provided them with an alphabet made up of the letters found on signs in the local area.
And from these they created short snappy instructions that would make good signs. They then made signs to encourage more people to try fun activities in the streets.
On the 10th of March Lottie visited Drew Primary again to build on the ideas introduced during the first session 2 weeks earlier. I showed them the plan of the play space provided to us by Townsend. We thought about what might work well in the space, looked at the ideas they came up with last time. They had lots of creative ideas for using normal urban spaces, where no play equipment exists. Building on this, they were shown images of the work of designers and architects who, using simple, cheap materials were able to facilitate play. The challenge to them this time was to design something that would facilitate the kinds of play they said they enjoyed.
Some children volunteered to act out ideas that they and the young people from Britannia Village Hall Youth Group had previously compiled. There was a very long list which included:
basketball, tree climbing, make a den, make patterns on the ground with stones, hopscotch, jump puddles, limbo dancing, one handed handstand, skateboard, street dance, stunts, table tennis and scrambling.
basketball, tree climbing, make a den, make patterns on the ground with stones, hopscotch, jump puddles, limbo dancing, one handed handstand, skateboard, street dance, stunts, table tennis and scrambling.
To help them visualize the space their designs might go into, we taped out some of the features of the space onto the classroom carpet using electrical tape. This required team work and was successful, especially with the group of boys who took the time to work out the best way to make the circumference of the octagonal columns on the ground out of rope and tape.
