Feral futures

Brownfield sites – access to which is often informal and unofficial – offer a valuable resource to local communities, and especially young people, for whom green spaces are rare and unusual. In 2018, we worked with local schoolchildren to showcase this value in nearby museums, and raise awareness of the local significance of these often under-valued sites. At the same time, the project built upon research into trespass which showed that what we value in nature is related to how we connect to our nearby wild areas.

Our project built on the work by Feral Space/Urban Wilderness at Burslem Port, to encourage schoolchildren to think carefully about what the space meant to them, and to raise awareness of such sites’ importance by exhibiting chosen artifacts from the site at the Potteries Museum and 2018’s Stoking Curiosity Festival. We encouraged roughly 10 local schoolchildren to think themselves as explorers and researchers of Burslem Port, a place with many stories, so that they took charge and ownership of the chosen objects. We then exhibited the objects so that visitors had to provide their own reasons for choosing an artifact in order to learn the story provided by the child researcher.

• Keele Academic Lead: Dr Ben Anderson
• Methods used: We took a small number of local schoolchildren around Burslem Port, an area of disused land in Middleport. We asked them to choose, or photograph objects that they would like to exhibit, and tell us why they chose them. We then exhibited the objects in the Potteries museum, and the Stoking Curiosity Festival, both as a part of the Being Human Festival 2018. At the exhibition, visitors were asked to choose an object, give their own reasons for choosing it, and were then provided with the child’s reason. In this way, the schoolchildren researched the space, and then presented their findings to visitors to the exhibition.
• Lead partner: Urban Wilderness (then Feral Space)
• Other partners: Stoking Curiosity 2018, Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.