The Together Fence High Lane Playground-Your Voice Your Town

The Together Fence is a collaborative public art project in High Lane Playground near Mayfield Primary school that will be implemented between May and July 2026. This project will be co-designed and implemented with school children, parents/carers and the nearby neighbours. It aims at transforming the park’s fence into a colourful artistic expression of Hanwell’s diversity by installing a series of picket fence boards on which children will paint their self-portraits with the support of our volunteer artists. Starting mid-May, we will host weekly painting sessions in the park with groups of children—  eveyrone who plays in and cares about this playground is invited to take part! We will start every session with open conversations around skin colour, identity and self-expression as well as discussing the meaning of inclusion and accepting and being curious about all cultures and ethnicities.  

Apart from transforming the fence, we aim to bring together and make use of as many resources and as much participation from the local community as possible; the nearby primary school’s eco-club will simultaneously implement a series of environmental / recycling installations on the other side of the fence inside the park. We will try to use additional donations or possibly remaining funds or paints to add colour on various elements within the playground and add a blackboard or a busy board within the playground.

Our main focus is to reimagine the fence of this playground as an artistic representation of Hanwell’s diversity and we hope that as a product of rigorous collaboration and high artistic quality, it will become a colourful, meaningful and sustainable legacy that showcases what coming together as a community can bring to our public spaces.

We will be putting up posters with the dates of the workshops around the playground so if you’re around, please drop by with your little ones and be part of this fun and purposeful process!

This project is led by Let’s Talk About This (LTAT): a parent/carer-led support group that exchanges ideas and resources on how to talk with our children— in an age appropriate way— about important social topics such as racism, ethnicity, gender, disability, neurodivergence, consent, immigration, mental, physical and sexual health, environmental sustainability, social justice, and activism in general. SInce 2022, we continue to host parent conversation circles, seasonal book swap picnics and a book exchange network where families can borrow books from a shared collection donated or lent by all members of the network. All books in the collection address *inclusion and diversity*—through their topics and themes, through representation in their characters and settings, or through their authors.