Pages of the Park | Local History Through Sound with Delilah Sykes

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.

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.