HOP ABOARD! Gravesend

HOP ABOARD! Estuary 2025’s engagement programme including workshops and resource packs for local schools and live briefs with FE colleges culminating in two professionally curated exhibitions. The project has been supported by Southeastern and is part of the Railway 200 programme celebrating the  200th anniversary of the birth of the modern railway.

The HOP ABOARD! programme will invite audiences and participants to explore how movement, memory, and time shape our understanding of place. It investigates the shifting landscapes of the Estuary, the trades and industries that have defined it, and their own role in imagining its future. It explores landscapes past, present, and future through shifting perspectives. Train windows reveal layered moments in time: fields giving way to factories, waterlines shifting with the tide, industrial sites reclaimed by nature. Work will explore the Estuary’s past (its industries, railway history, or landscapes before development); The present (what they see today); and An imagined future (a utopian, dystopian, or ecologically transformed Estuary).

The programme aims to empower participants and festival visitors to see change not as loss, but as a vessel for action; for communities, for the environment, and for the landscapes still to come.

This year, Estuary festival has selected artist Maraid McEwan to devise and deliver the project. Maraid has worked with young people to explore how both the physical landscape of the Estuary and the metaphor of a vessel can hold memory, transformation, and possibility. Through co-created sculpture and material experimentation, participants were encouraged to see themselves as vessels of knowledge and potential, shaped by place, but also shaping its future.

Read Maraid McEwan's full artist bio.

Project image: Maraid Mcewan