Flora & Fauna

David Freeman & John Merrill

Long Causeway – Flora & Fauna

The city of Peterborough has aspirations to be the greenest in the nation, thus it sought to establish an area outside of the city where these goals might be furthered. Peterborough City Council commissioned Broadbent Studio to provide art interventions that would help define a new public area in the heart of the city. The outcome was the sculpture Flora dn Fauna, which was completed in 2015.

The sculptures’ conceptual information was gathered from Broadbent Studio’s website. In response to this area, they developed a graphic floor design that investigates the local natural surroundings and the significance of the overall setting. A well-known poem by local poet John Clare surrounds the design.

Architectural masonry company Scribble Stone created the floor design out of green granite (Figure 4-6). To create the design, it was blasted to three different depths by water jet cutting, some areas were air pressured etched, and others were left polished to ensure a high level of contrast in the design detail¹.

Local schools were given the opportunity to create poems, and the best of them were cast into a bronze strip that is encased within the seats surrounding the floor design.

They designed artistic boundary markers that honour the local trees present in Peterborough in order to delineate this new space. The totems are 3 metres tall, made of English oak, and David Freedman, a modern blacksmith artist, designed the metalwork ‘leaves’².

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