Local school children’s creativity goes on display through huge art installation at the Southbank Centre

Nearly 3,000 young people from London, Birmingham, and Manchester have taken part in the Southbank Centre’s expanded schools programmes to mark its 75th anniversary.

Supported by Apple, the Imagine the Future and Reframe: Inspire Schools projects empowered over 2,750 young people in London, Birmingham, and Manchester to get creative through zine and poetry making – boosting their digital literacy, creative writing and creative confidence. The projects were delivered in partnership with Factory International in Manchester and Midlands Arts Centre (MAC) in Birmingham.

For the Reframe: Inspire Schools project, young people took part in digital zine workshops led by artist-educators. 21 schools were involved and 105 workshops were delivered, reaching 476 students. The project focuses on increasing essential digital skills through the creation of multimedia creative zines. Using the Apple iPad, students weaved together visual art, poetry, and digital layout design, mastering creative technology to create zines themed on celebrating their local areas, personal dreams, and life in 2026. Reframe: Inspire Schools is in its third year of delivery.

The Imagine the Future programme, led by renowned poet Lemn Sissay and a team of poet-educators, combines poetry and visual art. Between January and April 2026, the team worked with 2,319 schoolchildren in 93 classes from over 40 schools across the three cities to explore how history can help us understand the present and look forward to the future. The students were introduced to visual poetry which explores language as a visual medium designed to spark imagination and creativity, using creative formats such as blackout poetry and poetry comics. The Southbank Centre is home to the National Poetry Library, which holds the largest public collection of modern poetry in the world, including hundreds of visual poems to inspire creativity.

The result of their imagination is a 93-line collaborative poem called Gift to the Future, with each class contributing a single line curated by Sissay and the poet-educator team. This powerful piece has been transformed into a large-scale, site-wide physical public art installation, making the voices of this new generation visible to the Southbank Centre’s over 11.6 million visitors. To further celebrate their work, the children’s visual poems have been compiled and preserved in a special-edition 75th-anniversary newspaper anthology, representing their gifts to the future.