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.