Bedford Creative Arts have invited artists Andy Field & Beckie Darlington, who have previously collaborated with us with News News News and Lookout, to return to the town and give children the opportunity to tell us about Bedford as they see it. Children from Priory Primary School, Brickhill Primary School, Kings Oak Primary School and Putnoe Primary School will create a guidebook called The Book of Bedford. It will be one book of many in Andy and Beckie’s ‘The Book of Your Town‘ series.

The project invites a predominantly adult audience to see and experience Bedford through the eyes of its youngest residents. By exploring what children find significant about their town, this large-scale socially-engaged project offers a fresh perspective on the familiar and the predictable. To see the sights that children deem important, to follow both their favourite walks and their favourite ways of walking, to navigate through real and imagined streets in their footsteps. Part fictional imagining, part actual guidebook, The Book of Bedford will serve as a valuable listening tool to hear Youth Voice in an inventive manner.   

Whether you are a visitor or a local resident, this project is a way of expanding what you think you know about a place and an invitation to participate in a conversation about the very different values and meanings that adults and children ascribe to the things they encounter in the world around them. 

For the young people involved in the project it is an opportunity to reflect on and document their unique experiences of the place they live – to describe the distinctive texture of their own lives and to challenge adults to think about the space they enable children to take up in the world. 

For the wider town, the book is an opportunity to reconsider the narratives of importance that shape our perception of that place. Who decides what is or isn’t worth seeing? Who makes decisions about what places are worth preserving and what can be allowed to fall into ruin or disappear completely? Who tells the stories that define the identity of our towns and cities, and how can we begin to empower people to tell new stories, and challenge those with power to listen to them?  

The Book of Bedford will be created between September 2024 and March 2025 and launched in Spring 2025.   

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