Park of Words – Shoreditch Park

Shoreditch Park is located in London’s Hackney Borough – a large open space with avenues of trees – a place that is much loved by the local community who frequent the green space for play, recreation, dog walking, sports and wellbeing. Tasked to create a number of interventions including wayfinding markers around the park circumference, new bespoke gateway lettering groundwork designs and a long 40m narrative fence situated between the adventure playground and sports field to make a new functional art installation. The fence is made from reclaimed palette timber giving a textural and timber-worn colour finish. Along it’s length poems and two-word kennings written by after-schoolers attending Ministry of Stories workshops are etched into the timber strips – each poem typeset in a different font so that readers can follow the course of each poem – one or two running the fence’s full length. We invited the young writers to the park to meet local ecologists, historians, archaeologists, artists and musicians and working with professional writing tutors, they turned the facts, finds and stories they discovered into the poems which were etched into the fence and which are 100% unedited. The phrase ‘if you write a story, this is where it takes place’ was selected from the one of the poems to run along the length of the fence to be read from a distance bringing another narrative level to the piece. Fabrication and installation by Standard 8.