Project Parr is a new three-year-long project that we are making in collaboration with Broad Oak Community Primary School and the social arts agency Heart of Glass.

We will spend three years working with the same group of children at Broad Oak as they move from Year 4 through to Year 6, whilst also bringing other children from across the school into the project each year. The children have named this collaboration Project Parr and their overall aim for the project is to create something new that improves the lives of people in their community.

Project Parr is the culmination of five year of work across three earlier projects with Broad Oak Community Primary School and Heart of Glass. It was intitally developed through a residency in 2023, where we met with teachers and children from across the school, looking together at a range of inspiring socially-engaged projects from The King School Museum of Contemporary Art in Portland to Hunt & Darton’s Kids Business, and exploring what kind of new project we might want to make.

The result was a plan for a three-year project which will involve our young collaborators making a new artwork with and for Parr each year.

For the first year of the project (2024-2025) the children created a brand new documentary film about Parr, called The Beautiful Things About.

The Beautiful Things About is a documentary portrait of Parr in St Helens created by some of the area’s youngest inhabitants. Over two weeks in October 2024 they took us to their favourite places, interviewed people from across the community including teachers, taxi-drivers, chip owners, former miners and local councillors, and showed us what it’s like to live in this place they love and care about so much.

The film premiered at the beautiful Lucem House cinema in St Helens in February 2025 and is now available to watch online.

You can watch the film below and read more about it on the Heart of Glass website.

Project Parr has been supported using public funding by Arts Council England and Paul Hamlyn Foundation.