This project involved thirty-two 12 year-old children (KS3–YR7) from St. Paul’s High School, Wythenshawer, Manchester.

The project was based on the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority (QCA) Scheme of Work – Art and Design Unit 7C/Year 7 – Recreating Landscapes and the QCA Curriculum and Assessment Document – Language for Learning in Key Stage 3.

In this project the topic of QCA Unit 7C was changed from an exploration of landscape to townscape as a starting point on which to base their two and three-dimensional artworks. The children explored written descriptions of life in towns and cities, past and present, and studied the work of artists who have used the built environment as inspiration for their art.

The aim of the project was to encourage the children to develop their of use language in the process of learning through reading, writing, listening, speaking and to combine these with the graphic languages of drawing, painting and modeling.

The children read extracts from the book “ Invisible Cities” by Italo Calvino and talked about how the author was recreating the stories told by the explorer Marco Polo to the Emperor Kublai Khan when he returned from his travels. Other extracts that were read allowed were from The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo in which he describes the built environment of medieval Paris. Color slide images of maps, drawings, paintings and photographs of urban environments, present and future accompanied the process of reading about the built environment.

The next stage in the project was that each child was asked to imagine a fantasy city and then to produce drawings and paintings of how they visualized it would be. Each child was then given a large straw sun hat as a base and framework on which to build a miniature model of their imaginary city. It was explained to them that the scenario of the project was that when they put on the hat and looked at themselves in the magic mirror the city of their imagination would become visible in the mirror.

Over the four-week period of the project the children worked with their teachers and support workers to write individual poems describing what they felt it would be like to live in their imaginary city. Working with the music and technology staff they then produced a CD recording of themselves speaking their poems and this was played as a soundtrack to the exhibition of the project in the Young Persons Gallery.