How Butterflies and The Sea Swallow Story Helps Care for Cleveleys

A community event at Jubilee Gardens, Cleveleys, today 26 August, brought supporters of Care for Cleveleys(CfC) together to raise funds for the charity's aims.

Among their aims, beyond gardening and litter picking equipment for Cleveley's town centre public areas, the group is raising funds towards Christmas Lights to encourage visitor footfall in the year's darker, colder days.

A mural is currently being painted onto hoardings at Jubilee Gardens by Blackpool artist Christian Fenn. The mural depicts scenes from a children's storybook, The Sea Swallow. There are Sea Swallows, Sea Ogre, Sea Ogre's paddle, Mary, and Mary's Shell, and butterflies. All of these objects can be found along the coastline at Cleveley's promenade.

The hoardings protect a sectioned-off part of the Park which is being used to store rocks prior to their redeployment along the Wyre coastline where they will improve sea defences. 

As part of today's event visitors were invited to paint butterflies onto the hoarding in exchange for a donation to CfC. See the butterflies here.

Butterflies are important to Christian. While he was recovering from drugs and mental health issues he was encouraged to paint butterflies and has now launched the butterfly effected website which is 'using art as a vehicle to spread hope, positivity and inspiration'. He appeared on BBC News on 8 August.

• More about the public artworks associated with the Mythic Coast project can be found at Broadbent Studio's website.
• The Sea Swallow (paid link) picture storybook was written by children’s author Gareth Thompson and is aimed at Key Stage 2 children.
• More about Care for Cleveleys.
• Support Care for Cleveleys by donating through Ko-fi.

All pictures © A D Winter 2023




The Hoarding




The Sea Swallows.




The Ogre and Ogre's Paddle.




Mary with her shell.




The Wild Sea.




Visitors to the event queue to take turns painting butterflies onto the hoarding.









Objects in the story can be found in artworks along the coast at Cleveleys. In fact, the most obvious one is Mary's Shell on the beach, opposite Jubilee Gardens at Cleveleys:








Mary's Shell was put into place on the morning of Wednesday 25 September 2013 [*]

The Sea Ogre is on Cleveleys beach

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