Temporary public artwork

Urban Wilderness CIC commissioned artist Anna Berry to create a temporary public installation for Longton as part of The Moony Club programme.

During her site visits, Anna became captivated by the buddleia growing from Longton’s heritage buildings — a plant both loved and loathed in equal measure. Its resilience, beauty and refusal to be contained became the starting point for Renewal.

Buddleia insists on growing in the most unlikely places: cracks, rooftops, chimneys and abandoned brickwork. To Anna, this stubborn plant acted as a symbol of hope, hinting at the possibility of renewal emerging even from difficult or neglected circumstances.

Yet buddleia is also treated as a pest, often removed in attempts to preserve historic fabric. Anna recognised this tension as a metaphor for Stoke-on-Trent’s relationship with its industrial past:

the constant pull between conservation, pride in heritage and the desire for reinvention.

Renewal responded to this complexity through a sculptural form created from hand-rolled cones made in tyvek — a material that looks like paper, conveys fragility and nods to pre-glazed porcelain. The installation appeared to grow up a lamp post before arching above the street, fusing organic forms with civic architecture.

Like the buddleia, the artwork temporarily claimed the structure it inhabited, becoming something new in the process — joyful, strange, and quietly assertive.

About the Artist

Anna Berry is a UK-based artist known for installations that question how public spaces are shaped, controlled and experienced. Urban Wilderness CIC invited Anna to create work for Longton because her practice speaks directly to the politics and poetics of place-making.

Anna writes of her own work:

“I make art almost precisely because the last thing I’m able to do is pin words on this. And now they want me to write about it: if it wasn’t so tragic, the irony would be hilarious.”