Creative workshops in Burley Park, Autumn 2025 – Summer 2026

Pages of the Park is a year-long community arts project bringing people together through creativity, nature, and shared experience. Developed by our Arts and Community Coordinator, Leah Anderson, in partnership with local artists Nat Hues and Delilah Sykes, the project invites residents to take part in free, hands-on workshops inspired by Burley Park and the stories it holds.

From Autumn 2025 to Summer 2026, a series of small, welcoming sessions will explore how spending time in the park can spark imagination, encourage self-expression, and build confidence. Together we’ll experiment with visual art, sound, and storytelling—creating an open space to notice, play, and reflect on our connections to our local environment.

Workshops will be shaped by participants, with each session offering something unique:

With Nat Hues, you’ll discover “treasures” hidden in the everyday landscape, foraging for objects and ideas that become the starting point for creative works in print, collage, drawing, and more.

With Delilah Sykes, you’ll dive into local history and sound, looking and listening closely to Burley’s past and present to create a collaborative multimedia map of the area. 

The outcomes of these sessions will form a growing community archive of artworks—culminating in a final printed piece co-created by artists and participants. This will serve both as a creative legacy and as inspiration for the future of Burley Park.

More about the artists and what each workshop will entail:

Community Cabinet of Curiosities Creation with Nat Hues

Pages of the Park is a year-long community arts project bringing people together through creativity, nature, and shared experience. From Autumn 2025 to Summer 2026, a series of small, welcoming sessions will explore how spending time in the park can spark imagination, encourage self-expression, and build confidence. Together we’ll experiment with visual art, sound, and storytelling—creating an open space to notice, play, and reflect on our connections to our local environment.

Join Nat Hues as she takes you on a walk around Burley Park, and we discover the joy of practicing creative curiosity and noticing our natural environment. We will each explore our relationships and connections with the park and nature as a whole, by foraging for tiny ‘treasures’ amongst the ordinary, banal and everyday sights of an urban park. 

Our findings will form a collaborative Wunderkammer (“room of wonder") or cabinet of curiosities, a style of collecting, documenting and preserving natural found objects originating in the 16th Century, and popularized by the Victorians.

We will head back to Leftbank to reflect on and share with each other our findings, before documenting them in a creative way. Choose from a variety of mediums, from simple relief printing to collage, writing or drawing, to create your own record of your treasure. Your piece will then be added to an ongoing archive which will eventually form a collaborative ‘cabinet of curiosities’ style piece celebrating Burley Park and its community.

A chilled, accessible and reflective session, this Autumn Session is the first of 4 seasonal workshops with Nat!

Exploring Local History Through Sound with Delilah Sykes

Pages of the Park is a year-long community arts project bringing people together through creativity, nature, and shared experience. From Autumn 2025 to Summer 2026, a series of small, welcoming sessions will explore how spending time in the park can spark imagination, encourage self-expression, and build confidence. Together we’ll experiment with visual art, sound, and storytelling—creating an open space to notice, play, and reflect on our connections to our local environment.

In this workshop we’ll be exploring local history and sound. Together, we’ll delve into archive materials connected to Burley Park and ask: what can we learn from the past through sound? We’ll imagine the soundscape of Burley’s history—what might you have heard? We’ll investigate who lived here, what work they did, and how the landscape was shaped by this.

In the second half of the session, we’ll head out to Burley Park to record sounds that resonate with the past—modern echoes of historical soundscapes. Back at Left Bank, we’ll listen to these recordings together and build a collaborative “sound map” of the area, linking present-day sounds to the stories and lives of the past.

The workshop is led by Delilah Sykes, a conceptual artist working in sound and text. Her work bridges cultural histories with intimate, human stories, encouraging people to engage with the familiar in new ways. She is passionate about uncovering the significance of liminal, “unheard,” or background sounds, and exploring what they reveal about our experiences.

All sessions are free to attend  through funding from Love Leeds Parks and are open to everyone. The sessions are designed to be friendly and accessible. Workshops will be hosted in Burley Park, with Left Bank as a base and wet-weather backup. All materials provided! 

 Volunteer opportunity: We’re also looking for volunteers to help develop the digital archive of the project, capturing workshops and supporting the creation of a lasting record of community creativity - Interested? Please email leah@leftbankleeds.org.uk to find out more.

Come along, try something new, and add your page to the story of the park.