Spring Garden's stories

 A WORD ON THE STREET 

we're looking for new poems about Buxton's Spring Gardens
Resident? Visitor? Tourist, troubadour or ghost, we’re looking for poems, snippets and short stories that celebrate ( or haunt, or disturb) Buxton’s Spring Gardens

Shakespeare Hotel

Deadline: 31^st January 2023

Work needs to be your own (or submitted with original author's credit and permission!)

Length: please keep it short: no more than 500 words/ Ownership remains yours....if further publication of work arising from this project looks likely, we'll come back to you for formal agreements

Send as word doc to: creepingtoad@btinternet.com

 

Miller's Cafe and Tea Room

To take a walk along Spring Gardens in Buxton is to wander through a slice of the town’s history. The Grove Hotel at one end is said to have been named in memory of a sacred grove from the town’s Roman and pre-Roman history. Metal arcades hail from the heyday of  visitors “taking the waters” (baths can still be seen (but not taken) in the Cavendish Arcade and the Pump Room). The Springs Arcade is more recent, as are many of the shops, but they still hold secrets, hide secrets, and sit squarely beside or on top of relics of other times. 

Memories linger. The Shakespeare Garage is the last legacy of the Shakespeare Hotel and the Shakespeare Theatre. Tucked away courtyards speak of other street patterns.

Everything changes. The Picture House that became the Spa Cinema has gone but the NatWest corner that once sported an ice cream parlour and an intriguing flight of steps is now going to change again.

 

What matters to you when you walk along the Gardens: a shopping list, a café, this shop or that shop, a friend you’re going to meet, a pigeon sitting on an awning watching you?

 

Milton's Head Pub?

As part of the Our Street project within the Buxton Heritage Action Zone, “Word on the Street” is collecting poems. What might inspire you to scribble a sketch with words? To tell us a tale of shopping? To slide through time to earlier days? To turn a shopping list into rhythm and rhyme? We are mostly looking for poems (or short prose pieces) around spring Gardens but if you wanted to write about Buxton as a whole or other aspects pf the town, please do! All of this work will feed into a drop-in day for the public on February 19^th 2023 at The Pump Room (times will follow) where some of the work received will feature in a small exhibition. Work will also appear in a series of posts here for you to read, laugh at and share with all your friends, relatives and the neighbours who really annoy you….Sorry, no prizes but our thanks, no reward but public delight (hopefully) in your words

 

Where might you start?

• New shops, old shops
• Go shopping through time – look at the photos!
• Or people-watching through time
• hidden places: the River Wye runs in culverts under The Springs
• lost places: Shakespeare Theatre for one
• Charity shopping
• Café life (so many tables in the Gardens, so many places to stop and chat – both now and 100 years ago)
• Wells: the Children’s Well at the western end is the most recent addition to our town’s collection of wells
• Individual shops and spaces: an assignation in Hargreave’s Tea Rooms (now, or maybe 100 years ago?)
• Music, celebration, an older route for the carnival….
• Winter in Buxton…..(there's a lovely post by Buxton Museum and Art Gallery about winters here....)

CLICK ON THIS LINK FOR A GROWING GALLERY OF HISTORIC IMAGES FROM SPRING GARDENS

 

The Picture House

Writing ideas? Need a thought to get you started?

Take a word, add another, add a feeling, season and spice and see what comes next

 

Inspiration: there are some historic images of Spring Gardens here, more will follow

 

Stuck for what to write? Try: 

• an acrostic: take the name of a shop perhaps and let the letters of that become the first letters of the lines of a poem
• a haiku: three lines, 5 syllables, 7 syllables then 5 again: ideally there are two observations (lines 1 and 2) then your own response (line 3)…the syllables aren’t fixed…think as 2 observations, a breath and a reaction and improvise!
• Rhyme if you want to (street, feet, neat, door, more, sore, shop, drop, pop….lots of easy rhymes along the Gardens) but you don’t have to!
• Take a set of phrases about Spring Gardens and try jumbling them up and create a journey of images along the Gardens
• limerick if you need to! usually lines 1, 2 and 5 rhyme with 8 or 9 syllables, while 3 and 4 rhyme and have 5 or 6 syllables...

 

OUR STREET

‘Our Street’ will bring Buxton people together. Through a series of events and activities, we’ll support local artists and organisations to connect communities with Spring Gardens and its surrounding streets. We’ll celebrate the heritage of the area, have fun and create lasting memories for participants and audiences, locals and visitors, young and old.

Buxton Museum and Art Gallery

many thanks to Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and Derbyshire County Council for supplying these (and more) wonderful images of an older version of Spring Gardens

Spring Gardens looking towards the Crescent

Lawson's Vaults, No. 2 Spring Gardens

corner of Spring Gardens and Terrace Road: look at the level of the road!

City dreaming

 

New city dreamings:

a few days in Reykjavik

 

I have a few days here in the Land of Fire and Ice – neither of which have I seen much of. I’m in Reykjavik. I was due to be here for The Creativity Conference but when the 2022 conference went entirely digital and left Iceland behind, I thought I would come anyway (it's not too late to connect up with this year;'s Conference and see all our sessions recorded...and there will be mor next year! follow the link above))

 

And no, I haven’t done Golden Circles, or plunged into hot springs, or gone skinny-dipping in lava or wind-surfed a glacier or pursued whales on waterskies (go on, visualise it:  a whale on waterskies….seal yes, but whale….). And I have got very tired of people telling me where I should go, and what I should do but never asking what I want to do….

 

I can walk to the seafront with its piled-boulder defences in just a few minutes from my apartment. I can sit here in one of those late northern evening and watch the clouds gather, piling up and then resting on the mountains across the bay. Mountains! Mountains holding cloud and suddenly I am somewhere warmer watching Table Mountain and the cityscapes of Cape Town.

 

 

 

So what do I want to do? Did I want to do?  That made me reflect on how I visit new places and I realise that especially in cities I don’t know, I just wander. Museums, yes. Art Galleries, yes. Castles, dungeons, ruins, yes. Botanic Gardens, always. But more than anything, I love new cities for simply watching.

 

I want to know “what makes this place home” or maybe “how would I live here?”. So I watch people. Listen to people. Talk to strangers. Have conversations with the Hidden Folk (as Those Others are called here), watch birds, miss amphibians (here) and generally revel in the quiet things. I ask myself lots of questions. Sometimes I ask other people, but mostly I just wonder

 

I love places for themselves: not for the spectacles they offer but for the lives they reveal. So, here, yes, food is expensive (but how high are wages?). Here, I meet very few e-cigarettes compared to UK and see what feels like a lot of people smoking. Here, I don’t walk through the sudden sweet smell of pot. Good buses, quick buses. People who smile. Electric scooters whizzing about. Street art. Public art. Amazing statues. Statues of people who were doubtless worthy but did they have to be turned into such tedious statues (same goes for most municipal areas in the world it would seem)? Lots of languages and especially exciting when the dominant language is not English. Humbling at how good Icelanders’ English is. Here, my tatooed feet inspire wonder.

 

 

 

And how could I not love a city who turns out in such revelry and diversity and enthusiasm for Pride? And who even have a street painted with rainbows and include pink flamingoes in the march (I am pretty sure the Flamingo Animateurs with Brits…)

 

More street trees than I was expecting…rowan, hairy birch, sweet-scented poplars, leathery tea-leaved willow but it took several days before I saw blackbirds and fieldfares and starlings. There is a little auk in the bay – or maybe it’s a murrelet. I’m not sure but have enjoyed its disappearing acts: dives without effort and is gone. There are gulls and more gulls and terns lilting along the line of the seafront. And in the evening the moon jellies show as they hover in the waves below the great boulders that protect the shore

 

And there is the Sun Voyager monument and I wonder all over again how fascinating it is for people to know their history in this land so precisely. Yes, there are challenges about the Book of Settlement but when those Vikings arrived they were the first: for once no native people to displace (there were rumoured to be some Celtic monks but no-one knows for sure). The story of people in this land of fire and ice is remarkably charted and the sense of place and belonging this might offer – must offer? That is what I would like to talk to people about...

 

 

Mouse maps and free events

 

Mouse Maps and wandering creatures

free events in Buxton

Summer 2022

As the summer opens up around us, working with the Stronger Roots project and the Buxton Civic Association, Creeping Toad is organising a spire soft free public events through the rest of July and August….

You can follow updates on event plans through

Stronger Roots/BCA: events page: https://buxtoncivicassociation.org.uk/events-and-bookings/

Eventbrite: Buxton Civic Association Limited Events | Eventbrite

Facebook: @BCABuxtonCivicAssociation

Twitter: @BCA1967

Creeping Toad:

Facebook: @creepingtoad

Twitter: @creepingtoad

Sunday 24^th July

A Mouse’s Journey

how do we understand the world – as mice, moles, birds and people

11:00 – 15:30

Venue: Buxton Country Park, Green Lane, Buxton, Derbyshire, SK17 9DH

Follow the flags from the steps into the wood

 

A mouse builds its own map of the world around it: places for food, for shelter, for safety, of danger. Every journey  – even the water running through the caves beneath Buxton’s hills – tells a story that can cross time as well as landscapes. We will be building our own maps of animal journeys through Grinlow Woods: mice in the undergrowth, moles underground, bees among the flowers, birds through the tree tops.  We’ll also look at the long-distance adventures of our swallows and curlews and pick up ancient human journeys through our hills: packhorse paths, Stone age tracks, Roman roads can all be found here. 

No bookings necessary - just drop by and join in!

 

This event is part of the Festival of Archaeology. You might like to visit their event programme and see what other explorations of the ancient and the not so old you might venture into!

 

Woodland Tuesdays

Last summer we had a great time doing something creative and often rather crazy (I’m thinking of pom-pom monsters in the pouring rain and discussions about the Gadley Pirates ailing boats over the woodland floor) every Tuesday through the school summer holidays. Our Woodland Tuesday sessions are back again this summer…

 

For all these events: 

·      when you reach the wood, follow the flags to find the activity

·      you can book a free place through Eventbrite – but you can also just turn up on the morning! (Eventbrite links are placed for each session)

·      allow 30 – 45 minutes to do the activity (but remember you can go exploring the woods afterwards!)

 

1. Tuesday 26^th July 

The Wild Beasts of Buxton

in Corbar Woods, Corbar Road, Buxton, SK17

What3words location: pill.friends.snooping 

10:30 – 13:00

Making crazy puppets inspired by the woods: foxes with furry paws and snapping jaws, long wriggling snakes and cute mice

Eventbrite link

 

2. Tuesday 2^nd August 

Pom-pom wonders

in Grinlow Woods, Buxton Country Park, Green Lane, Buxton, SK17 9DH

10:30 – 13:00

Pompom-flowers, woolly bumblebees, fluffy butterflies or unknown creatures that sit on your nose! Where will our pompoms take us today? Join us to invent some fabulous pompom creatures and the world they live in. bring your own pompom maker if you have one (we have lots but more are always helpful!)

Eventbrite link

3. Tuesday 9th August

Woodland Art

in Corbar Woods, Corbar Road, Buxton

What3words location: pill.friends.snooping 

10:30 – 13:00

Capture our woods, the animals, the trees, the stories, the monsters with pencils and paper, and pictures made from natural materials, or paint made from mud. A careful session or maybe a messy one! It’s up to you! 

Eventbrite link 

4. Tuesday 16^th August 

The Gadley Pirates

in Gadley Woods, Gadley Lane, off A53 Leek Rd, Buxton

What3words: oatmeal.shelter.flickers

10:30 – 13:00

The Gadley Pirates are back! Join us to make tiny pirate puppets, devise treasure maps, find some nature treasures and go home with a box full of wonders – and a pirate to guard it!

Eventbrite link

 

5. Tuesday 23^rd August 

Fairies, goblins and dragons

in Grinlow Woods, Buxton Country Park, Green Lane, Buxton, SK17 9DH 

10:30 – 13:00

Twigs, leaves, mud and more will help, a twist, a tie and a face will give us some strange and wonderful creatures that might (or might not) live in our woods. Time to think and experiment and make a world of adventures

Eventbrite link

explore,     

walk,    

wander,    

make,   

talk

celebrate....a summer of creativity 

in the woods of Buxton!

 

Digging, shovelling, sowing and growing

Growing gardens, stories and wonder
Botany Bay project, summer 2022

We are

Diggers and shovellers,

Weeders and waterers.

We are strawberry-savers

And raspberry-tasters.

(Medlock Primary School, Manchester)

 

Hurst Drive, 1

We had started with plans. There were discussions, visits to museums, to gardens, visits from storytellers, gardeners, cultural experts. Our new gardeners sowed ideas, watered imaginations, got carried away. Eventually there was earth and digging and grubby hands and seeds in pots

 

There were successes. There have been disasters. There have been slow starts and reluctant germinations, but gradually our Botany Bay gardens are taking shape. 

 

We’re proud of our team

And all our hard work

We’re proud that we can deal with our problems.

We want to start eating the food that we grow,

And we want to grow to help each other,

To help our school, to help the animals that visit us.

(Oswald Road Primary School, Manchester)

 

“BOTANY BAY is a Participation and Learning project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.  The project makes use of the migration histories of plants and crops, and their Indigenous cultural heritage in relation to ecology and reciprocity, as a way to stimulate young people to explore new ways of living.  The Covid-19 pandemic and the climate crisis have made a re-assessment and recalibration of human relationships to the non-human an urgent necessity, and young people have to be at the heart of this process, forging a future for humanity and the planet.” (Introduction from the ORIGINS website)

 

I was one of those early visitors and this summer returned to 4 of our gardening schools. I was shown round vegetable beds, introduced to sunflowers, had a club's organic principles explained to me, sampled raspberries and commiserated with one group who had seen all their work trampled by other children at their school – not maliciously, just people who did not realise that these were seed beds and not just bare patches of earth. 

Hurst Drive sunflower

We have a garden waiting

Like an idea in the dark of the earth,

Children waiting to dig,

Seeds waiting to grow,

Dreams waiting to flower

Into a garden of wonders. 

 

Our garden will be a bright garden,

And have a beautiful blossom tree

And there will be strawberries…

Juicy strawberries,

The juiciest strawberries in all of London!

And when our strawberries are ripe and ready 

We’ll pick them and wash them and eat them.

(Cavendish Primary School, London)

 

Part of my role within the wider Botany Bay project is to help the Gardening groups build the stories of their gardens. On this trip we were looking at words: harvesting, tasting, enjoying words like strawberries. In the autumn or winter, we are planning on creating Garden Ceremonies – or Sharings or Events (we’re not quite sure what!) and the collective poems that are growing out of these sessions will feed into those occasions….

Oswald Road gardeners are also poets and artists

For now, I’d like to share some of our words and some pictures of progress with a round of applause for all our gardeners (schools are listed below!) and with many thanks to the teachers, support staff, volunteers, and simply everyone who has been helping these gardens grow!

 

In our garden

Chamomile beams a sunny smile
And garden queens grow ivy-white crowns.

The massive hearts of squash leaves

Shade their sisters from the sun

While sunflowers grow as bright as the sun and stars

And the forget-me-nots never forget us.

Here rosemary grows with frosted leaves

And chives are spicy although garlic is best.

 

We are proud of this garden and

How quickly it grows, and

How richly it flowers, and

How friendly it becomes, and

How delicious it will be.

We are proud of our garden and all it holds,

We are proud of our gardeners and all their hard work.

 

In our garden,

Everyone deserves a crown

We are proud of our garden. 

It deserves to be treated with respect and love.

(Hurst Drive Primary School, Waltham Cross)

Woven into all this digging and sowing is an awareness that when we plant a garden we are also planting stories and connecting to cultures - both our own and cultures and communities in far away places. We hope  that if we listen to the stories that belong to those people and their plants it might help us appreciate our gardens more deeply and grow those gardens more effectively. So we know we are growing stories as we grow gardens: old stories, ancient stories and brand new ones of our own.

In our garden,

We have snail-rails

And parties for bees,

Logs for woodlice

And tree-stumps for beetles...

In our garden,

We are growing a team,

Who work together,

Who help each other,

Who support each other,

Who care for this garden.

(Medlock Primary School)

With many thanks to the Botany Bay team and to our schools and their gardening teams

Cavendish Primary School, Chiswick, London

Chiswick High School, London

Hurst Drive Primary School, Waltham Cross, Herts

Medlock Primary School, Manchester

Oswald Road Primary School, Manchester