Event type: Other

Hilbre Island walking tour includes a guided tour of the grade two listed buildings currently being converted by the Hilbre Community Land Trust and British Art & Design Association into artist studios and a research Centre for Arts, Science and Sustainability.

A walk across West Kirby beach to Hilbre island, and a tour of the seven semi-derelict grade two listed buildings that form the Hilbre Community Land Trust. The tour includes a talk on the British Art & Design Associations project to create a Centre for Arts, Science and Sustainability.

The creation of the new Centre provides a long-term sustainable use for the empty listed buildings and creates a facility that will foster collaboration between creative and environmental science disciplines. Hilbre has no mains infrastructure and this project will become an exemplar for off-grid sustainable energy/waste/water systems.

The walk will start and end at West Kirby Marine Lake car park.

Port Sunlight’s historic buildings, open landscapes, museums, galleries, event spaces and creative industries make the conservation area an attractive place to live, work, and visit.

The planned worker settlement’s influence on early twentieth century town planning is undeniable. However, Port Sunlight is globally unique. Architectural historian Dr Heather Alcock and Conservation and Maintenance Manager Dr Gareth Dean will lead a walking tour that highlights what sets it apart. They will also reveal the intersections and disconnections between the site’s 100 years of company stewardship and current collaborative site management practices. They will highlight the community’s century of iterative development and how it is being reshaped by and for local people and climate change resilience today.

Aside from specific built heritage policies focused on development management control and the primacy of residential uses, Port Sunlight has been excluded from forward planning in local plan development in Wirral since the 1920s. Yet Port Sunlight and heritage communities like it present opportunities for appropriate development and even transformation. The tour will introduce twenty- first century projects instigated by and for local people, improvements to management practices to support climate change resilience, adaptive reuse projects that are reinvigorating the community and both restrictions and opportunities for Port Sunlight’s future.

Event Partner:

Port Sunlight Village Trust

Guided by the belief that imagination is our most important form of technology, Sahjan’s new exhibition (darkforest) The Zone of Ghosts invites us into a world created in collaboration with young people aged 12-19 from Liverpool and Leigh. Within the gallery, a dark forest grows, and imagined artefacts made by the young people sit within the walls of an infinity-symbol-shaped structure. On one side, a digital and tabletop game can be played, and on the other, a campfire creates space to reflect and imagine how different futures might be made.

This is a great chance for fellow learning teams, academics, artists, and educators working with storytelling, to talk to the artist about how they created worlds, stories, and games with young people.

Complimentary pastries and hot drinks will be provided.