North Lodge Park in Cromer is a quintessential cliff top park, sadly neglected by the council for many years. For the past 2 years a volunteer group, the Friends of North Lodge Park have been working to bring life back into the Park, opening the Park café, restoring the Rose Garden and hosting events from out-door theatre to garden parties. The public response has been amazing with enormous support for the improvements, albeit to a small part of the Park.
Within the Rose Garden there is a plinth which used to host a bronze sun-dial now long forgotten, and where there is an empty plinth there is an opportunity. In the Spring of this year Bob Catchpole, a well known local sculptor, donated a sculpture to start a rolling programme of public art in the Rose Garden. Since it’s unveiling in April the sculpture has become a destination in the Park, and received significant publicity which has been good for the Park and the artist, even reaching the EDP’s feature of the 13 best sculptures in Norfolk.
Bob’s work caught the spirit of the Park with his long-established interest in the Norfolk landscape, celebrating the men who worked it; his re-use of old tools in his work fits the nature of the project to bring interest to the gardens which are developed and maintained by volunteers.
Bob’s kind donation has launched the project to develop a rolling programme of sculpture on the plinth in the Rose garden, for which we are eternally grateful. We are now looking to hear from artists who would like to work with the Friends of North Lodge Park to further develop the idea of Art in the Park.
The Friends of North Lodge Park are interested in speaking to artists who would like to help with the next phase of the project, by loaning a work suitable for the plinth or with ideas about how the project could be developed within the wider Park.
