Poetry Pool, This Must Be the Place, Ebbsfleet Garden City, 2022
This Must Be the Place is a pioneering three-year placemaking programme, created collaboratively with young people aged 16-25 years and commissioned artists, exploring and shaping Ebbsfleet Garden City as it is being built. Poetry is just one of the ways the programme aims to foster a deeper sense of home to ensure the wider community connects the history of the new city to its potential future.
I worked with over 200 local young people in schools and community settings to produce poems that will be embedded into the walls, benches, pavements, buildings and other civic spaces of a new city. In the workshops, we explored the opportunities and challenges presented by this new city and how we might connect the histories and potential futures of the social, political, geographical and civic environments in which we live. The aim was to imbue young people with a sense of ownership of the decision making process that impacts the new town all while learning to write powerful poetry.
I don’t often get to have deep conversations with architects, developers and engineers about what a city needs, other than the obvious, for a poetry project. I love the idea of these kids walking the streets in 2035 as adults, when work of building the city is scheduled to finish, and seeing their handiwork dotted around the new, green metropolis.
