Since Christmas the brilliant Feral Productions and me have been working on The Last Call, a site-responsive project in nine red phone boxes in Herefordshire. And now we’ve finished – I wrote nine (well, eleven) poems, visiting each phone box back in January and February, clambering inside and writing (with gloves on) notes for making poems.
Then Estelle at Feral Productions commissioned Sophie Cooper, sound artist, who visited the boxes all over again and made site-specific recordings. Estelle dreamed up the wonderful tiny story-glimpses, drawing on my poems and re-inventing them in astonishing ways. And then the project employed actors, filmmakers and a host of skilled people to make these nine varied, particular and delightful little films.

You can find them all together on Feral Productions’ YouTube.

And there is a little pamphlet of the poems, which also explains the project. These will be available from Courtyard Arts in Hereford, who funded The Last Call.

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Here’s a gallery of photos, all the way from me writing in the cold of January to Feral Productions trying to film in the absolute teeth of this May…

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We had a great time last week launching The Last Call at Courtyard Arts in Hereford, in a carefully socially-distanced, masked kind of way – and now the films (and at the moment just some of the poems) are out there in the world to be enjoyed. Thank you so much to Estelle van Warmelo, all at Feral Productions, Sophie Cooper, and all at Courtyard Arts. And thank you all the many people online who contacted us with their own phone box tales and photos. The red phone box is special in this land.

I absolutely loved this project.