participatory storytelling

Young people, co-creative storytelling, and protected natural space

Wybunbury Moss

This is a story about the time that Art Club went to Wybunbury Moss 

Art Club are rowdy. They are clumsy and fierce. They are fourteen years old. They’ve spent two years at home. They are scared, and they are angry. They have dyspraxia, dyslexia, ADHD, trauma and anxiety. They don’t like to fit in, except with each other. This is true most of the time. 

Wybunbury Moss is delicate and dangerous. Deepest caverns of centuries old peat lie half an inch either side of the two foot wide path. The caverns have lain there since the ice age. The path is indistinguishable from the mossy scrub that will sink away at your lightest footfall. A tiny beetle that looks like a yellow ladybird lives here and no-where else. The Moss is tucked away behind a contemporary housing estate behind a pub with good food and an Anglican church, but it’s not a place that you can come to alone.

We meet in the church yard after dinner in July. We think it might rain, bringing excitement after weeks of heat and drought. Everyone is ready for the end of school term. The adults are distracted by the ongoing news from Westminster and we update each other as we assemble. One of our team arrives last: the Prime Minister has barricaded himself into Downing Street and is refusing to resign. 

We set off, heading down into the glacial reservoir. Art Club don’t look as though they’re listening. They tease C loudly for wearing flimsy trainers. They pretend they’re going to push her off the path. Jenni Tibbets is an experienced ranger, used to bringing school groups through the Moss. She knows its wonders and its dangers, she has her tricks to bring them alive to young people. Art Club act out drowning in peat while she tells them about the changes that have taken place where they are standing over a million years. D suddenly stands still. 

A week later, in Art Club, he creates a collage from photos he’s taken and recounts, word for word, the story of the ways that time and place move differently at Wybunbury Moss.

*

We thought we might talk about ways that we protect places, or ways that places protect us. Instead, we talked a lot about the trees that died in the acidic moss, sunk, and rose again. Resurrection trees. And we talked a lot about Beadamoss, the moss that’s been introduced to compliment the growth of the slow-growing sphagnum moss native to the site. We turned the name into an imperative, and settled on it as a metaphor for how we should engage with nature.

Be the Moss. 

gallery of photos taken by art club at wybunbury moss

about art club

Our vision is to transform young people in Stoke-on-Trent through their personal creativity, improving their social, educational and emotional wellbeing. It is vital that Art Club can be accessed by any young person in the city, regardless of their economic circumstances.

“I just want to thank you for putting this on. [My child] is really struggling mentally at school and we struggle to get him in but he absolutely loves art club even though his face doesn’t show it. He talks a lot about he is doing and has been inspired…thank you for making a difference”

As a non-profit Community Interest Company, we rely on donations from individuals, companies and grant-giving bodies to deliver Art Club and our wider work.

You can help us to achieve our vision by supporting Urban Wilderness CIC.