Cambridge Junction, in collaboration with Cambridge Room and Cambridge University Press & Assessment are excited to launch the Book of Cambridge, the culmination of a unique project made with children from primary schools across Cambridge.
Working with artists Andy Field and Beckie Darlington the Book of Cambridge project has empowered local children to describe Cambridge in their own words, exploring both real and imagined versions of the city.
The guidebook, co-created with over 100 learners from Orchard Park, St Laurence Catholic, Milton Road Primary Schools, weaves together real facts and helpful information with made up stories and wild speculation.
Adults are now invited to see Cambridge through the eyes of these children, offering a fresh perspective on familiar and lesser-known parts of the city.
Like every guidebook, the Book of Cambridge is both a map and an incantation, showing its readers the way and inscribing familiar places with new meaning. It is an opportunity to reconsider who tells the stories that define the identity of our towns and cities, and how we can begin to empower people to tell new stories, and challenge those with power to listen to them.
Free copies of the Book of Cambridge can be collected from our Box Office, or downloaded or listened to as an audiobook using the below links.
Commissioned by Cambridge Junction, in partnership with Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Cambridge Room.
Download The Book of CambridgeListen to the audiobook
The Book of Your Town is a guidebook to a town or city created by up to 250 local school children aged 8-11. Part fictional imagining, part actual guidebook, the project is large scale piece of social-engaged practice that invites its predominantly adult audience to see and experience a town or city through the eyes of some of that place’s youngest inhabitants.
The project is an opportunity to look beyond the familiar and the predictable. To see the sights that children deem important, to follow both their favourite walks and their favourite ways of walking, to navigate through real and imagined streets in their footsteps. Whether you are a visitor or a local resident, this project is a way of expanding what you think you know about a place and an invitation to participate in a conversation about the very different values and meanings that adults and children ascribe to the things they encounter in the world around them.
The first version of The Book of Your Town was created in 2021 in St Helens, commissioned by social arts agency Heart of Glass as a way of bringing together young people and policy makers to think about their relationships to the town. The project won the Liverpool City Region Impact Award for Improving Education and Learning in 2021.
Photos by Liam Togher.
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