“Every child deserves a place that feels magical”: reflecting on the Garston Residency

Garston residency was part of the Culture Liverpool’s Creative Neighbourhoods programme; a collaborative project for communities throughout Liverpool. It is a series of creative interventions in wards across the city, taking the form of artistic residencies, development of public art, events and creative engagement workshops. This work uses co-creative practices to address the needs of each community at neighbourhood level. This programme is about creative place-making while platforming local voices and stories.

Miriam Fluchter, photographer in residence, reflects on the 2-year long programme: creating it together with the children, looking at how infrastructure and architecture affect local communities, bringing your own childhood memories and venturing from the playground out into the real world.

Adventure Playground: developing a project together with children

I started working with children at Garston Adventure Playground, otherwise known as The Venny in 2023, as part of a residency commissioned by Open Eye Gallery and Culture Liverpool. I knew I wanted to use the project to look at how architecture and infrastructure affect communities and how the particular architecture and infrastructure of Garston affected the local community there, but we didn’t know exactly what we wanted to make yet. I’m primarily a photographer working with analogue photography techniques, and so we started out making pinhole cameras from cans and photographing the children’s familiar environment at the Venny in black and white. 

A highlight for the children was when we developed our own photographs. The Venny is a great environment for children, and families in the area seem to be very grateful for this provision. Children can roam freely around the vast grounds of the former railway sidings, and the youth workers excel at allowing the children to explore on their own, while still keeping a watchful eye on them. When they say adventure playground, they really mean it. There’s a zip wire, a basket swing, a football pitch, a playground for smaller children, an area to do gardening, the most wellstocked art room you have ever seen, a soft play area and a ping-pong table. I grew up in a small town in the German countryside and in The Venny I felt transported out of the urban environment of Liverpool back to the forests, fields and gardens I used to play in growing up. This should be the baseline. Every child deserves a place that feels magical.

Garden of the imagination: exhibition at Open Eye Gallery

Slowly the project started taking shape, as I began recognising more and more of my own childhood experiences in the children’s perception of their environment and as I was faced with the challenge to curate some of the work we had created so far, for the autumn 2024 Socially Engaged Photography exhibition at Open Eye Gallery, the theme of childhood and nature emerged. To add some context to the work, I interviewed photographer Chris Isles about his childhood in Garston. Chris spoke about old railway sidings where he and his friends used to play in a disused signal box, saying the box was their “den” and the sidings their “adventure playground”. It reminded me that children are great placemakers. 

To me the title the work was exhibited under in the SEP exhibition “Childhood is a garden” refers to that ability of children to imbue a place with magic, and find beauty and adventure wherever they go led by unbridled imagination. Perhaps I was thinking of it in a vaguely biblical sense, although metaphorical, paradisiacal gardens exist and have existed across many different folklore traditions and faiths. But do we really have to leave this garden of the imagination?

Childhood is a Garden: Interview with Miriam Fluchter

Venturing into the real world: Garston art trail

For the second part of this project, we decided to venture out of the adventure playground and into the “real world”. Together with the youth workers at the Venny, I planned a photo walk for the children that would take them along St. Mary’s Road with the opportunity to meet different placemakers in the community. Leading up to this we did a lot of work to visualise the terms ‘neighbourhood’ and ‘community’ and this led to the creation of ‘Ghostie Street‘. 

Spirit(s) of Dreams Activity Book (pdf) – an activity book created by Miriam Flüchter and Evyn Seaton-Mooney, with photography, original concept and original artwork all by the children at Garston Adventure Play.

Ghostie Street is a high street, like St. Mary’s Road, only, it is not populated by people, but by ‘ghosties’. In the children’s drawings the ghosties look much like your traditional kid-friendly ghost – you could imagine a person with a sheet over their head – that type of thing. But I think in their function they are more akin to the sprites or fairies, which often feature in the folklore of the British Isles. They represent the life spirit of the area. They are modern day mythological creatures representing a particular kind of environment, the demands and challenges that environment places on the people who inhabit it, but also the positive gifts that this environment provides.

Ghostie Street Map (pdf) – a guide to the Spirit(s) of Dreams exhibition by Evyn Seaton-Mooney and the children of Garston Adventure Play

Project in numbers 

• 2 workshops with teenagers at Employability Solutions 
• 1 visit to St. Michael’s knit and natter group 
• 12 visits to the Reading Rooms (Bingo Group, 65+) 
• 1 greenspace consultation 
• 10,939 visitors to “The Flowers Still Grow” Exhibition
• 31 workshops at Garston Adventure Play
• 725 guests at exhibition launch 
• 2 exhibitions 
• 6 businesses participated in family trail 
• 1 kids launch party 
• 90 – age of the oldest participant; 3 – age of the youngest participant 
• 150 people engaged through workshops and interviews 
• 6 interviews

Why are creative projects important for children?

Case Study 1: Nancy. Nancy was one of the youngest children on the project, being only four years old when I first started workshops in the Venny. To begin with, she barely spoke in workshops, was shy and quiet and usually joined with her dad, being a bit too young to take part by herself. It was great to see her grow into a confident and communicative six year old, who became one of the most involved and outspoken children on the project. When we started the last phase of workshops in 2025, Nancy could clearly express what she wanted to do, ask other children for help and (with some encouragement) provide help to other children. She was usually the first child to join any workshop, was open to trying new activities and took a leading role in conceptualising ‘Ghostie Street’. Nancy is now a confident photographer and has her own camera at home. 

Case Study 2: Isaac. Isaac was the oldest member of the project’s consistent core group. He gets easily overwhelmed by busy or loud environments and enjoys one-to-one time with a trusted adult in the art room. He is a quick learner and usually doesn’t need instructions to be repeated and he works well independently. He quickly understood the more technical details of analogue photography and photo development and after some encouragement, he began taking a leading role in the workshops, helping younger children and explaining activities to them. By the end of the project, Isaac seemed like he was on the cusp of aging out of the group and looking for new challenges. He joined the workshops together with his two younger siblings, and it was always nice to see him in an environment, where he was not in the role of big brother and able to explore his creativity entirely on his own terms.

Case Study 3: Noah. Noah’s absolute highlight throughout the project was his visit to Open Eye Gallery to see the SEP Exhibition and ‘Childhood is a Garden’. Subsequently, he mentioned the visit almost every time he saw me, asked when we would go to the gallery again and frequently created artworks “for the gallery” (in his own words).

“It makes me feel like a kid again just discovering the world!” – visitor feedback, The Flowers Still Grow exhibition

Building on the relationships developed through this residency programme, we are delighted to announce an upcoming legacy project, beginning in January 2026 where we will continue to work with Garston Adventure Play (known locally as ‘The Venny’).

The project will continue a focus on Garston village and hyperlocal areas to St Mary’s road, supporting young people to explore, document, and celebrate their immediate surroundings using photography, craft, and storytelling. The programme has been shaped directly through a recent consultation with the young people who participated in the previous residency, ensuring their voices, interests, and creative priorities guide this legacy work alongside Culture Liverpool’s objectives.

Text and images: Miriam Fluchter