Can you tell me about the title of your project, Children Own the City, and the school you have worked with?

Children Own the City comes from as a series of five workshops and canal visits that took place with children from Raynham Primary School. The children's experience of the space that they're in and the city changing around them is crucial. I’m interested in the childrens’ ownership of the city. It's really an invitation for them – they will inherit the lived environment from us adults in the future but the project also asks what happens if they inherit it now? What happens if they could change their environment? The work for the festival distils all of these engagements with the children and looks at ways for me as an artist to respond them and to support them. Their voices are present throughout the work.

Who else have you and the children worked with?

Some amazing people including Iveta Bejaoui the Assistant Headteacher at Raynham Primary; Zahra Haider Regeneration & Development Architect at Enfield Council; Amy O'Shaughnessy Architectural Officer at Enfield Council; Tolu Faleti Client Commissioning Project Officer at Enfield Council, Sandy Rompotiyoke, Regenerative Advocacy Lead at Periscope, Christina Kalinowski founder of Doodle Designs, Artist Claire-Anne Abi Ola, Bob Chase of Barge Fiodra, Artist Facilitator Rosie Strickland and Mike Wakeford the Learning and Skills Coordinator at Canal & River Trust.

What’s been the timeline of the work?

I’ve had several focused blocks of time with Raynham Primary School, from April-July 2023, with the first festival on 24 August 2023 on the River Lea, and then another series of sessions from October-December 2023. Last year we did a huge amount of work starting to think about the environment and about space, working with Assistant Headteacher Iveta Bejaoui. I've been amazed by the children’s abilities to perceive questions about ecology, pollution and about their own relationship to the Lea Valley, about how communities operate on the waterways. The final phase of my residency with the school ran April-May 2024 and these last sessions started with the canal on Barge Fiodra and at Chalk Bridge, with the children thinking about what's going to be here on site in twenty years’ time and if this is how they want their environment to be. They used sketchbooks on the canal visit to explore these questions and we expanded on their ideas in the classroom.

What ideas have the children generated?

I'm interested in their ethics, how they're seeing equity and equality, and how they can work with these questions within the school. Their ideas are phenomenal. The children want to build a cat cafe, a museum, a community library, spa and three bakeries. They don’t want to build police stations or offices. So there's an interesting sense of what is being lost on site and what might potentially be built in the future. On the Barge Fiodra the children sat and looked and they drew their experiences of the waterways. They considered what else could be there, as we sat on Chalk Bridge in November and April in totally different temperatures and looked at the built environment together and asked what they wanted to see. For the children, it’s all about doing. It isn't about talking. My background in teaching comes from Fine Art, where you can sit and pontificate. Children are often happy in conversation but pontifications are a no no. Getting directly into the stickiness of masking tape and paper straws, finding out if their buildings could stand or were going to fall apart – that was the real joy of it, the physical making and building.

How have these activities developed into the work for the festival?

I'm proposing a pavilion next to Chalk Bridge. It's a big structure for a series of the children’s works which gives it gravitas, in that you want to take this work seriously. I undertook lots of interviews with the children and lots of sound recording, really wanting their voices to be present to explain their work directly. I have photographed is the rubbers that they've used throughout the project when sketching and writing which they've hacked into or drawn on. The rubbers represent those moments of boredom that children experience during anything, you know, those moments where they're working through an idea they want to realise. These are taking form as a video that is underpinned by the sound of the classroom.

Have you worked with the same children over the course of the project?

There’s been a mixture of year groups and with different children within those that I've encouraged. What delighted me in the final phase was that some of the children who’d been involved for a longer period of time almost started mentoring some of the incoming children, explaining what the project was and what they could do. It was exciting and felt like it was something they owned. We need to take children seriously – their intellect, resilience, their incredible opinions.

The children are the local experts.

Yes, with a real vision of how things might be and a capacity to creatively problem-solve, how to navigate these different spaces within the city. If you want imaginative wayfinding ask the children how to navigate through industrial estates, how to cross the dual carriageway or the Meridian Water Railway line to access Bloqs or the River Lea Navigation.

How will the children’s voices and ideas be present in the festival?

Voices will be present via audio and video. There have been the most amazing discussions between the children. Their architectural models and drawings will be accessible. They are excited to have their work shown. I'm also keen that the pavilion is an open invitation by making this offer to other children so that they can contribute their ideas throughout the festival too.

Do you envisage a way to take the children’s propositions forward beyond the pavilion at this point?

That's a critical question. The relationships are palpable and that’s important in an area that is developing. Their work with Amy and Zahra, with the council and the Canal & River Trust, between the different realities of engineers, boaters and architects, for instance, has been empowering for the children. They've talked about how these buildings might be in public space – structural points as well as ideological ones. I hope the pavilion continues to have some usable function for the school. These works are being presented in public and they warrant discussion. I hope there are opportunities for the school to continue to connect the children’s ideas with the world. A child's perspective is vital.

The impact on each child is unknown, with hopefully a ripple effect in the future.

The community of people who live on canal boats is much bigger than it's been in the past. It feels like it's another alternative for living in the city. To introduce the children to an architect who is working in the borough where the children live – this kind of realisation from the children was raising goosebumps. That the person in the room isn't working somewhere that's miles away from them these roles, architect, engineer, artist are present in their neighbourhood.

How does your wider artistic practice feed into the work?

I'm somebody who has a strong investment in collaboration and pedagogy [the method or practice of teaching]. Part of that is an understanding of the value of my own arts education. Whether my work is from the perspective of collaboration, facilitation with artists or helping students, or my own thing, I need it to be useful. Most of the work I do takes place outside of gallery spaces. Sometimes it's taken place by railway sidings, allotments or in artist-led spaces – in situation and space. The gravitational pull of Raynham Primary School has been a real joy for me.

Anneka French is a writer, editor and curator who works for art publishers Anomie and Hurtwood as Project Editor and contributes to publications including Art Quarterly, 1000 Words, Burlington Contemporary and Photomonitor. Recent commissions include those for Alexander Berggruen Gallery, Photoworks+, Grain Projects, TACO! and Fire Station Artists’ Studios. She has worked on publications including Turner Prize 2021, Kathryn Maple: A Year of Drawings (2023) and the forthcoming The Anomie Review of Contemporary British Painting 3 (2024), Tang Shuo: Shadows of Boulder Hill (2024), Raghav Babbar: Indian Summer (2024) and a monograph on Susie Hamilton (2024). Anneka is an independent curator currently working with Coventry Biennial. She spent four years as Co-ordinator and then Director at New Art West Midlands (CVAN) and spent six years as Editorial Manager of contemporary art magazine this is tomorrow. Anneka has worked at art galleries including Tate Modern, Ikon, The New Art Gallery Walsall and Wolverhampton Art Gallery.