Over the last six months, we have been taking Art UK's Tagger into community groups in Stoke-on-Trent. We have worked with groups of all ages, but the projects below highlight the ways the city's young people have got involved with the Tagger initiative and how that led them to experience more of the art around them.

Pinc College students photographing autumnal landscapes along the Caldon Canal

Tales in the Park

Organised and hosted by The National Literacy Trust, Tales in the Park is a series of storytelling festivals that take place in parks around Stoke-on-Trent. The festivals travel to each of the six towns that make up the city of Stoke-on-Trent, and members of Art UK's community team attended two of them in the summer of 2024.

Tagger is a micro-volunteering opportunity available on Art UK's website, and we were about to spend the day in a field with no access to power or WiFi! Some thinking was done, and we devised a Tagger activity that required neither internet access or electricity.

Children and families attending the festival were invited to look closely at local artworks that we had printed off at a large scale and write down five 'things' they could see within the image.

Young people looking closely at an artwork and pointing out things they can see

Regular Taggers will be familiar with this, as 'things' is the first category on the Tagger interface on Art UK, requiring Taggers to list the objects, ideas, emotions or colours they can see.

Once five things had been identified, the next challenge was to photograph those same things in the surrounding green space. Some children raced off and found their five in record time, whilst others explored at a slower pace, in between taking part in other activities on offer at the festival. All participants were invited back to show us their photographs and repeat the activity on another artwork.

A phone photo of a park building laid over 'A Town on Millennium's Eve' by Tim Lloyd (b.1959)

Impressively, one family even managed to include all five things in a single image.

A phone photo showing a boy sitting on a bench reading

Some families made it as far as trying our most challenging artwork, The Second-Hand Dealer by Arthur Berry, and took on this challenge valiantly.

After the event, we received feedback from some of the families who took part, who told us that they enjoyed 'looking at the art and finding things in the park', and they learnt that 'the more you look, the more you will see.'

A parent told us that it helped her children 'be more aware of their surroundings and what's around them and helped them to notice more, which helps them in the long run because they are seeing different things they might not necessarily pay attention to when they're just walking in a daze.'

Pinc College

Pinc Creative College is an Independent Specialist College offering unique creative study programmes in 13 creative campuses located in galleries, museums and cultural locations in the Northwest, Midlands, Yorkshire and Wales.

Stoke-on-Trent, where Art UK's head office is located, has its own Pinc College campus at The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

In autumn 2024, a group of their learners embarked on a four-week Tagger-inspired project to coincide with their curriculum that term, themed around colour and place. Students began by adding tags to printed artworks using small Post-it notes.

Pinc College student adding post-it note tags to an artwork

Next up was learning to tag digitally. The group watched a demonstration of Tagger in action and then had a go themselves. Once they'd got the hang of things, which didn't take long, students took part in a timed Tagger competition. Everyone had 20 minutes to add as many colour tags as possible to artworks on Art UK from The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery's collection. Some students were so eager to get started, they came back from their break early, something their teachers informed us doesn't happen often!

Once the 20 minutes were up, we used Art UK's Tagger leaderboards, which update in real time, to see who had added the most tags in the allotted time. The winning student received an array of art prizes, and bragging rights for the remainder of the day.

To make use of their newly refined close-looking skills, the following week, students ventured out on a guided photowalk to capture the colours in their local landscapes.

Inspired by local artists they had been introduced to whilst tagging, that included Maurice Wade, Charles William Brown and Julian Trevelyan, young people explored Hanley Park and took photographs that highlighted the autumnal scenes around them.

Students then used editing software on their smartphones to further enhance the colours in their images.

Some chose to give their photographs warmer tones, inspired by the work of Charles William Brown, whose paintings sometimes have a distinctive yellow hue due to a varnish used to seal the final artwork.

The artwork is 'Walking in the Park' by Charles William Brown (1882–1961)

Whilst others mirrored the photographs of William Blake, who shot his images exclusively in black and white, which would have been the norm for photographers of his time.

The artwork is 'Longton Park' by William Blake (1874–1957)

In the remaining sessions of the project, students got to see some of the artworks they had tagged in real life, as they were given behind-the-scenes access to the stores at The Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

In a stroke of luck, a Maurice Wade exhibition and talk took place during the project timeline, so students were able to attend and went on to use his artworks for inspiration in a monoprinting workshop.

Pinc College student displaying a yellow monoprint based on the art of Maurice Wade

The project we ran with Pinc College is currently being turned into a learning resource for teachers and will be added to Art UK's Learn section soon.

Urban Wilderness CIC

Each year, Urban Wilderness CIC hold their popular carnival event: The Pigwalk. The event, and its name, are inspired by the following local heritage story.

John Aynsley of Aynsley China was Mayor of Longton from 1886. Aynsley made a bet with the Duke of Sutherland to walk a pig from Trentham to Longton. He did it!

For winning the bet, the Duke gave the land for Queen's Park to the people of Longton.

In the months leading up to The Pigwalk, Urban Wilderness CIC's volunteers and participants help with all aspects of parade preparation. To aid their efforts and provide inspiration, Art UK ran a Tagger session for their youth art club. Members of the group tagged artworks that depicted carnivals, parades and processions all around the world.

The artwork is 'The Grand Parade; Charivari' by Laura Knight (1877–1970)

Taggers worked in pairs to add as many tags to their artworks as possible in 20 minutes, but the group were having so much fun, that we bent the rules slightly to allow a further 10 minutes.

Urban Wilderness Youth Art Club tagging an artwork on Art UK

Using Art UK's Tagger leaderboards again, it was possible to see who had added the most tags, and which pair could claim their victory and a selection of prizes.

After trying their hand at being Taggers, art club members then had the opportunity to be public sculpture photographers. From 2017 to 2021, Art UK and our team of volunteer photographers documented thousands of public sculptures dating from the last 1,000 years, held in the buildings and stores of public collections, and situated in outdoor locations across the UK. Inspired by this incredible feat, art club members were tasked with photographing anything in their local town that they considered to be public art.

Group members taking photographs around Longton town centre

From futuristic bins to rainbow benches, the group questioned what art can be when looked at closely. They also found some hidden murals that even Art UK didn't know about!

An architectural photograph taken by a group member during a photowalk

Running these projects in Stoke-on-Trent has shown us how we can use Tagger as a starting point to engage young people more closely with artworks in their local collections and with local artists, and look more closely at the world around them. These activities show that no one is too young to learn about art and be creative.

We are continuing to run activities and events for a wide range of people across Stoke-on-Trent and the Staffordshire Moorlands in 2025, with more tagging, photo walks and park fun to come!

Natalie Willatt, Art UK's Community Volunteer Manager

Publication of this story was made possible with funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery players