Life in Maple Park: Young voices and the missing mural

Earlier this year, fifteen students aged between 11 and 15, from the Maple Park and Westbourne area, gathered as part of a workshop run by Youth Voices Matter — a youth-led community journalism project delivered in partnership by ICM and Ipswich.co.uk. They were being asked to do something that sounds simple, but rarely happens: to look at the place they come from and say, honestly, what they see.

The students did not hold back.

The whiteboard at the front of the classroom read: "Maple Park in one word."

"Unsafe." "Boring." "Dirty." "Nothing to do."

Among the responses, one stood out: a student describing Maple Park as a place defined by homelessness and visible drug addiction. Pointed out as a simple statement of fact — which is perhaps the most telling thing about it. These are children as young as 12 for whom the sight of people in the grip of addiction is normal enough to be the first thing that comes to mind when asked to describe where they live.

However, from the same group, describing the same place: "Enjoyable." "Fun to play with friends."

That contradiction — between the area some of them find unsafe and the one others find genuinely enjoyable — is not a confusion. It is what growing up in Maple Park actually looks like.

What they see every day

When the students were asked to think about stories worth telling from their area, one group went straight to drug use. Their focus, they said, should span the full range: "from alcohol to cocaine to crack and heroin." They wanted to help "prevent other people getting into this cycle" and to "warn people who don't know the area to be aware."

One student brought up a story from home: a parent who had encountered a homeless person near the park and offered to buy them a drink, only to be told they did not want a drink. They wanted cash, for drugs. Another described being chased by "a crackhead".

They are the kind of stories that do not appear in police reports or local authority project updates. It is the kind passed between families on the school run and quietly absorbed by children who are paying more attention than adults sometimes appreciate.

What they want

When the conversation shifted to what the students would like to see in Maple Park and the surrounding area, the responses were revealing in their range.

Some were ambitious. An escape room. An abandoned factory to explore. A portal, similar to the one in our town centre, connecting them to communities on the other side of the world — Japan, France, Greece, South America, China. Job trials.

Some were modest to the point of being quietly sad. More swings. Somewhere to fish. A full-size football goal. Somewhere to chill.

One request which generated much conversation was the concept of a "kids pub." It sounds unusual until you understand what the students meant — not alcohol, but a social space. Somewhere welcoming, somewhere with a table, somewhere that functions as a gathering place for young people who currently have nowhere particular to go. The feeling in the room wsa that there were things for young kids, things for over-18s, but nothing for those inbetween. The pub as a concept — a warm room, a community hub — is not a strange thing to reach for in a neighbourhood that once had one and no longer does.

One student, asked what single thing they would change, wrote "more recreation areas." Another, answering the same question, wrote: "Monarchy" – which sent the group down a rabbit hole that included Donald Trump, Elon Musk and geopolitics.

These students are not passive consumers of their environment. They are thinking about why things are the way they are.

The missing mural

Among the stories the students identified as worth telling, one group kept returning to the park's mural — or rather, to what has happened to it.

In October 2022, a 100-metre mural was unveiled at Maple Park. Painted by Czech artist Jitka Schejbalova, it celebrated landmarks from 12 cities around the world. It was not an abstract artwork dropped on the community from outside — it had been inspired by original drawings created by students from Handford Hall Primary School in Maple Park. It was, in other words, a piece of public art that belonged to the people who lived here.

Google Street View captured it in September 2023: vivid, colourful, wrapping around the wall behind the playground equipment at Stopford Court, bright against the grey of the surrounding streets.

By the time the Youth Voices Matter project begun, it was gone. The hoarding it was painted on, installed in 2019, had reached the end of its life and was removed and replaced with an anti-climb green fence.

The students in the workshop knew this history, in the way that young people who grow up somewhere always absorb its history. They knew the mural had been disappeared. They did not know why it had been removed rather than restored. Nobody, it seems, has told them — or anyone else.

"They need colour in parks," the group said. "The lack of colour in the park makes the area dull, when it used to be lively."

The students had clear ideas about what should happen next. Speak to Suffolk County Council. Speak to artists. Ask local people — children and teenagers — what they want on the wall. "Talk to people like artists," they said, "to see if they would like to get involved in putting a new mural up."

It is worth asking why the mural was removed. It is worth asking who made that decision, and whether the community was consulted. And if the answer is that it was damaged beyond repair, the obvious next question is: what is stopping anyone from commissioning another one?

The bottom line

The young people of Westbourne Academy were not asked about Maple Park so that their answers could be filed away. They were asked because they live here, because they see it clearly, and because they know – more than anyone – what needs to change.

Some of what they want will take time, money, and will: better facilities, more recreational space, somewhere for teenagers to belong. Some of it is ambitious enough to make you smile: a portal to Japan, a fishing lake of their own and an adbandoned factory for urban exploring.

But the mural is neither of those things. It is a wall. It has held something beautiful before, built from the drawings of local children, and it could do so again. If there are artists, community organisations, or commissioners in Ipswich looking for a meaningful project, Westbourne Academy has fifteen young people with very clear views about what should go there.

All anyone has to do is ask — and perhaps, first, explain why it was taken down in the first place.

This feature is part of a series exploring life in Maple Park. It has been produced as part of Youth Voices Matter, a youth-led community journalism project delivered in partnership by Ipswich.co.uk and ICM, and part-funded by Ipswich Borough Council.

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