Walking With The Snowman Sculpture Trails
Christmas time would not be the same without the adorable Raymond Briggs animation The Snowman. It was certainly a Christmas staple for me; as quintessential as the Turkey roast, the giving and receiving of gifts and the drinking of sherry. It tends to be shown on TV on Christmas Eve afternoon and I never once made it through watching without crying when the snowman melts. However there is now a new Christmas tradition starting to form – that of the Walking With The Snowman Sculpture Trails.
The run up to the festive season 2018 saw the first Walking With The Snowman trail launch in Salford, Greater Manchester. Considering all the other characters and animals I’ve seen featured in sculpture trails over recent years, including the Snowdog, I’m surprised The Snowman had not been covered sooner. It turns out though that 2018 marked the 40th anniversary of Raymond Briggs’ original picture book of The Snowman so it was a suitable time to celebrate and re-imagine him. The animated film followed just 4 years after the book aired for the first time on 26th December 1982. I was just 1 year old at the time, so it really has been with me every Christmas I’ve been alive, and I’d say for the first 10-15 years, there was very little competition for children’s festive TV viewing. The Snowman was it!
The Salford trail was clearly so popular that the 2019 festive season saw two further Walking With The Snowman trails take place, one in Middlesbrough and the other in London and I got to see both of those too!
So…..
What Are The Snowman Sculpture Trails All About?
Just 12 sculptures make up a Snowman trail, each one illustrating a different day from the festive song: The 12 Days of Christmas. In each location the sculptures were positioned so that you could naturally follow the trail in ascending or descending day order, depending on which direction you walked.
The Snowman trails are run by Wild in Art, a leading art events company that specialises in this type of sculpture trail. They tend to work alongside local councils and company sponsors to bring the sculptures to fruition and there seems to be a well oiled process that the trails go through from conception to delivery with the sculptures then being auctioned off to raise money for local charities once the trails have finished.
The Walking With The Snowman trails have been produced in collaboration with Penguin Ventures which is part of the publisher Penguin Random House UK. Each snowman sculpture was painted by a local or national artist, many of whom had previously worked on other Wild in Art sculpture trails. In fact with the first trail in Salford, each of the artists involved had painted a bee earlier that year for the Manchester based “Bee in the City” sculpture trail.
The Salford trail also incorporated a Learning Programme which 47 local schools and groups took part in to produce a cohort of mini snowmen to be displayed in The Lowry, the Lowry Outlet and the Open Centre at Media City.
During the trail, an online auction took place to auction off the large snowmen to raise money for BBC Children in Need and the small snowmen were given back to their contributing schools and groups to enjoy for furthermore. The whole project raised an excellent £16,475. I’m not sure (at the point of writing) what is happening with the snowmen from the recent 2019 trails in London and Middlesbrough as I couldn’t find any reference to auctions or charities online or while I was visiting. If anyone else knows, please drop me a line…
So, let’s take a look at some of the sculptures and routes…
Walking With The Snowman in Salford, Manchester
22nd November 2018 – 6th January 2019
I didn’t think I’d manage to get to this trail but I literally just caught it on the last weekend of the run in January 2019.
The trail started with a Partridge in a Pear Tree in the Lowry Outlet and then crossed the outdoor plaza to The Lowry theatre for Two Turtle Doves before continuing down the side of the outlet mall to cross the red bridge that separates the Huron and Eerie Basins. Walking back up the other side of the basin, Five Gold Rings was situated on the corner of North Bay with the whole expanse of Media City nicely pictured behind.
Proceeding back to the Lowry theatre, the route went behind the theatre to see Six Geese-a-Laying before then making a circular route across the Salford Quays footbridge, past the Imperial War Museum North to come back across the Media City footbridge to find the last four snowmen around the Media City complex.
The whole trail was nice and compact and easy to do in a couple of hours (with plenty of photo-taking time). This was the nice feature about all the Walking With The Snowman trails – they all took me less than 2 hours to walk around, which meant I could have spent longer doing things along the route if I chose to whether it be a bit of shopping or popping in to a museum or two.
I knew Salford Quays very well as I used to work at the Lowry theatre, but for anyone not familiar with the area, following the Walking With The Snowman trail was an excellent method of exploring it. It hit all the major tourist attractions and showed some of the best views of the area. As a result it brings in more visitors and boosts the local economy, two aspects all such trails seek to achieve.
It was the first time I had actually walked round the new Media City complex – (they were still building it when I worked there) and after the trail I went for a meal at The Alchemist which is the intriguing gold coloured building at the head of North Bay. It fascinated me so much I had to go try it out….and very tasty it was too! Definitely check it out if you’re visiting Salford Quays.
Walking With The Snowman in Middlesbrough
2nd November 2019 – 4th January 2020
In contrast to Salford, I had never been to Middlesbrough, despite driving past it on the A19 several times a year on my way to and from my in-laws. In all honesty, it is not a town I would probably have visited without a reason to either as the views of my in-laws who worked there for 30+ years and had no particular wish to return kept impinging on my thoughts.
If anything is going to influence me to visit somewhere though, it would be a sculpture trail. So while I was visiting the family over New Year 2020, I ’dragged’ Mr TJG down the road to Middlesbrough for some quality sculpture trailing!
The snowmen were dotted around the main town centre and amongst a lot of the shops, so I really got a feel for the shopping opportunities in Middlesbrough which I thought were really good. I couldn’t believe there were four different covered shopping malls. Not bad Middlesbrough!
The map of snowmen locations wasn’t the easiest to follow with pinpoints on the map being in the vague area of the location, so we didn’t follow the numerical route, but generally just headed to whichever next looked the closest. It meant we bounced around the shopping centres and I did a little bit of retail therapy while I was there.
It was nice to see three of the sculptures had been painted by local artists: the Partridge in a Pear tree by Adam Michael Worton, Nine Ladies Dancing by Becki Harper and Eleven Pipers Piping by Susan Noble. I particularly liked Susan’s gingerbread snowman where she illustrated the eleven pipers in the knitted stitch-work of the snowman’s jumper. It must have taken hours of eye-squiffied work to paint this!
Seeking out Five Gold Rings took us to the very attractive town hall building and the square beyond which I could imagine in the summer was a lovely spot to sit and relax / sunbathe. The Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art faced onto this square too and quite prominent was the Bottle of Notes sculpture by Claes Oldenburg. I think somebody must have put food dye into the water fountains though as I’m sure the water wasn’t meant to be pink, lol…
All in all I rather enjoyed my foray into Middlesbrough and took advantage of the New Year sales in places too. It was easy accessing the town from the A19 and the car park offered 3 hours free parking too: bonus!
If you want to check out further images of the Middlesbrough snowmen, then search the hashtag: #TheSnowmanWalkBoro on social media.
Walking With The Snowman in London
26th November 2019 – 6th January 2020
The London leg of the Walking with The Snowman trail was based in London Bridge and was part of London Bridge City’s “Christmas by the River” event which saw a market of 70+ festive stalls go up along the river between London Bridge and Tower Bridge and inside Hay’s Galleria.
Starting with a Partridge in a Pear Tree nearest London Bridge, the trail zig-zagged through pedestrian areas to finish in front of Tower Bridge with Twelve Drummers Drumming. It was an easy trail to follow despite a footpath closure leading us to nearly miss Three French Hens.
What I wasn’t expecting to see was that 7 of the sculptures were the same designs as those I’d seen in Salford the previous year, with only 5 new sculptures for the trail. It seemed such a shame considering the amount of artistic talent out there, that new designs weren’t commissioned for them all.
Like with Salford Quays, I knew this area of London relatively well, but realised I hadn’t walked this particular area of the south bank since Norman Foster’s City Hall was being built (it opened in 2002). Therefore most of the area between Hay’s Galleria and Tower Bridge was a building site when I was last there. What I now saw was a super trendy shopping and eating district with impressive surrounding architecture and fabulous river views.
Despite it being the first week in January all the market stalls were still operating, the Christmas trees were still twinkling and the whole South Bank was still rocking to Christmas, but without the pre-Christmas crowds I’m sure. This environment made the Snowman trail seem even more festive!
I particularly loved Jenny Leonard’s Four Calling Birds which depicted London’s most visible and mischievous bird, the pigeon as well the Tower’s resident ravens alongside some famous London landmarks. It also had an enviable position next to the magnificent Christmas tree in Hays Galleria.
The busy Eleven Pipers Piping had the tremendous Tower Bridge pictured behind, Nine Ladies Dancing had the Shard for company and Five Gold Rings stood in front of HMS Belfast. The trail certainly hit some huge London landmarks in a short distance.
Yes, the Walking With The Snowman team definitely chose the location well!
Can We Expect more Snowman Sculpture Trails?
So, with three Walking With The Snowman trails under my belt, I wonder what will come next. Will there be more happening come Christmas 2020? I know two consecutive years can hardly constitute a tradition, but surely three can?
Following sculpture trails are one of my favourite things to do, but is largely a summer and occasional autumn pastime, so it’s great that Walking With The Snowman has provided a winter’s trail. I saw so many people heading out on these trails with children and having tons of fun taking ‘snowfies’. So please Wild in Art…. please bring us more creative snowman magic and make this little blogger, and many many more happy!
Further Reading…
If you want to read about other sculpture trails I’ve followed, here are the ones I’ve written about:
Elmer’s Big Parade Suffolk Worcester Stands Tall Giraffes
Hoodwinked Robins in Nottingham Let’s Go Quackers Ducks in Ironbridge
Go Herdwick Sheep in The Lake District
If you’ve enjoyed reading this, please subscribe to my blog via email over on my profile page or through Bloglovin’. Then head on over to Facebook, Instagram or Twitter to keep up with all my travel related news. Hope to see you there.
Share this:
Leave A Comment