Foreword by Bryan Biggs

Foreword by Bryan Biggs

This collection of creative writing is a selection from a much larger body of work produced by participants in the Looked After Children strand of the Bluecoat’s 2022 project, Echoes and Origins. Funded by the Heritage Fund, this explored the eighteenth-century origins of our building as a charity school — Blue Coat School, or Hospital — for poor and orphaned children in Liverpool. The school moved to larger, purpose built premises in Wavertree in 1906, after which the building became a centre for the arts.

The other strand of the project, Colonial Legacies, examined the school’s connections to transatlantic slavery through its co-founder Bryan Blundell and many other maritime merchants who supported the school and who were involved in the ‘triangular trade’ in enslaved Africans. In delivering Echoes and Origins, and working with artists, academics and participant groups, we found cross-overs between the two strands, particularly colonial themes being reflected in the life of the school and in the experiences of the children. This was apparent, for instance, in the cotton that the children spun (to make their uniforms) coming from slave plantations in the American colonies, or children being apprenticed to sea captains involved in colonial trade.

The Looked After Children strand of the project involved a creative team, including designers Stand + Stare, dance artist Paula Hampson who worked with children from Kinship Carers, and Margy McShane who worked with a group of writers, some of whom had experience of the care system. We wanted to publicly share some of the writing that emerged from Margy’s workshops, and have selected one poem from each of the ten participants, in order to give a flavour of their interpretations of the stories of the Blue Coat children.

Bryan Biggs is the Bluecoat’s Director of Cultural Legacies