Your Streets Your Voices

When we started Neighbour Hood Watch, we felt that we needed to find out what people really thought about their environment, were 'the streets' really the dangerous places that the media would have us believe? is modern urban living a kind of extreme sport? There have been many studies examining issues but we had serious questions as to their validity and their relevance to specific places within our own city. the best way forward seemed to be to ask the people who know - the peole who inhabit these places. rather than taking the usual public consultation routes, clipboard attacks or community hall + sausage roll come-to-us approaches we took a more direct and potentially more risky approach.

We engaged two poets, John Rowe, veteran performance poet, a white-haired grandfather figure and Ed Henderson, slam poet and Chicago gang exile for the project. Armed only with a flipchart, some pens and their ready wit, they went to areas marked in the media as areas of high street crime, such as Nechells, Aston, Highgate, Ladywood and Newtown and would ask passers-by open questions such as 'If I ruled Newtown I would.....'. they would then take the responses to these questions and, retaining the vernacular would construct poems with the results.

The resulting poems were illuminating in themselves, many common themes emerged: there was a perceived lack of safe green spaces for inner citizens to use, many older people were concerned that young people did not have enought to occupy themselves, outside of education and training. There was a cynicism around agency intervention, and a genuine desire for change. There were other outcomes as well, during the Nechells visit the poets sparked a street debate involving 50 or so residents, with people nipping inside to bring out tea and nibbles for the chatting throng. In Newtown a group of youths were reconciled with a homeless man that they had previously thrown stones at, it emerged that the man felt no animosity to them and in fgact blamed the lack of organised activity and their boredom for their appalling treatment of him. We got people talking, which is always a good start when change is desired.

We were concerned that we did not take a 'fly-by-night' approach, that it was important that we reflected back to people our discoveries. So, with this in mind, we created the YSYV booklet, containing the poems Ed and John had constructed and distributed back into the communities we had consulted through libraries and other community venues. this wasn't enough, we wanted to make sure that as many people could access the work as possible, so we printed and laminated posters of the poems and put them up in shops, fast food outlets and anywhere we thought people would be able to see them.

There were other outcomes, too. We were once congratulated on the exhibition we had installed in a community centre, quite surprising as we had installed no such exhibition. It turned out that a local youth worker had got so excited with the project that he had installed the exhibition himself (we didn't mind, we are not precious about the collaborations we make with people), not only that, he'd had t-shirts printed with poems and we saw kids walking round the estate wearing them!

Your Streets, Your Voices was a collaboration with artist Simon Walker and was funded by Arts Council England.