#CrawleyMurals
This short film reveals the 5 finished murals that are part of a series of 6 created in Crawley, West Sussex in 2024 by Creative Playground.
In January 2023 we started a conversation with Crawley residents about the positive change they want to see in the town. They told us they want to brighten the town up with art and make Crawley a place where people can be inspired by just walking around. This is where the idea for the mural project came from.
The #CrawleyMurals have been made in partnership with a group of 19 Crawley residents who are part of the Creative Playground Playmakers group and/or were employed by Creative Playground as Community Connectors. We worked with them every month from August 2023 to now, to develop the ideas, recruit the artists (from a pool of 126 artists that applied from across the world) and decide on final designs and locations for the murals.
We ran workshops with around 350 other local people with the artists we commissioned who helped to shape the designs for the murals.
The sixth mural in this series will be installed in June in Manor Royal by artist Jac Seifert from Orakel Workshop. This project builds on other murals in the town that have been made and still exist including those in Three Bridges, on the wall of M&S in The Pavement, at Broadfield Barton, on Dorsten Square and in Crawley Library. There are others that sadly don’t exist anymore including the mosaic mural in Crawley town centre and we stand on the shoulders of all that work.
We hope these murals will last forever (well at least ten years) and that they will inspire others to brighten up the town with arts and culture of all kinds. We’d love to know what you think about them. Send us an email on [email protected] or DM us @creativeplaygroundcrawley on Instagram or Facebook.
Creative Playground Crawley is an arts project in Crawley, managed by arts charity Creative Crawley. It was set up to engage more local people in arts and culture, led by Manor Royal Business Improvement District and a consortium of local organisations: Crawley LGBTQU+, The Hawth, Caridon Housing Trust and Crawley Community Action. It is part of Arts Council England’s Creative People and Places programme.
Creative Playground puts residents at the heart of decision-making. Through boundless thinking, energy and commitment, the project aims to improve people’s lives by increasing Crawley people’s engagement in arts and culture.
www.creativeplaygroundcrawley.com
@creativeplaygroundcrawley on Instagram, X and Facebook
The #CrawleyMurals are funded by Arts Council England, Crawley Borough Council, Crawley Town Centre BID and Manor Royal BID.
The Mural launch in May 2024 was supported by Metrobus.
Creative Crawley is supported by Crawley College.
Images by Ian Greeenland, Rosie Powell and Jacob Punter (CFI Media)