New Meadow
One of the noisiest and most polluted roads in the UK, the A2, cuts through the heart of NewCross. On the edge of that road sits a community hub that has been fighting for survival: NewCross Learning. Inside, members of the public can access free, vital services. All they need to do iswalk in.
We have been working with them for over a decade, creating indoor and outdoor artistic interventions, to make the old library’s physical environment more inviting for their service users. New Meadow is the latest in this series of work.
This time, we wanted to create a colorful and inviting participatory artwork to help New Cross Learning stand out from the other standard shop fronts along the high street. We came up with a simple but effective concept, using the creative talents of local primary and secondary schools, as well as passersby. We asked them to create unique paper flowers – our aim was to reflect and stimulate the enormous vitality of the communities living in and around New Cross, and their capacity to reinvent themselves after the pandemic.
Today, the space is filled with a combination of carefully layered individual stories and complex shapes – it’s our very own cultural regeneration of the high street. The flowers are hugely diverse, both in terms of their manufacturing and the creative vision of their makers – from cute simplicity to elaborate geometric structures, designed around narratives old and new. They are all welcomed in our vivid meadow.
Special thanks to Emily Botterman who had the initial idea for a participatory meadow a few years back while doing an installation inside the Library and who collaborated with us this time by making a few special very special flowers
Funded by CEZ (Creative Enterprise Zone)
