A Time, A Place, The Honeybourne Line, Cheltenham
Thanks for visiting this information page about our project on the Honeybourne Line, for Cheltenham Borough Council.
We were commissioned in May 2026, after a thorough tendering process, to create some public art for the line. Our winning bid proposed to tell the hidden history of Cheltenham through a series of six sculptures along the Honeybourne Line. The surprising tales of people, and groups of people, who are often overlooked when yester-year is committed to paper.
To help us decide on which stories to tell, we devised and delivered a month long engagement process that asked people to respond to a one of twenty snippets of hidden history, that we haad researched over a two month period, chosen at random from our Design Engine.
By following a series of prompts, each participant was able to create short poem about how the snippet made them feel and their thoughts about it.
As well the Design Engine we also engaged people with nature walks along the Line. During these, Jo from Haven4Wildlife, imparted her plant-ly knowledge and showed participants how to pick flora responsibly. This material was then printed onto fabric using a process called hapazome.
This period of engagement gave us a lot of material to use as direct inspiration for the sculpture. It helped us chose which stories to tell and gave us words and plants to engrave on the finished work. It also gave us the catalysts to be able to create a station name for each finished piece. Each sculpture will be presented as if at a railway station and so has a station sign to "signpost" what the story is about.
There will be a few more surprises on the finished work, which we hope to install in Spring 2027, but we'll keep those under our hats for now.
We're sculpting two of the pieces in Pittville Park, Cheltenham, throughout November 2026, that's how you may have got to this page. We hope you enjoy them being created in front of your eyes.
Make sure you follow our social media accounts to keep up with the progress of the project.
Here's the design for one of the sculptures that we're creating in Cheltenham.
