On Sunday 3 November a group of about 20 people joined a walk organised by the Lewes District Anti-Racism Alliance to express solidarity with the writers of the Seven Sisters Country Park’s We Hear You Now project, whose work has recently been vandalised. The group met at the Seven Sisters Country Park Visitors Centre and split into three groups, taking different routes. 

We Hear You Now is a spoken word audio journey embedded in the landscape of the park and also available online. The series explores the history, biodiversity and topography of the area, through the lens of climate change, personal migration, legacies of empire and the writer’s own personal sense of belonging and connection to the land. For more information see the Seven Sisters Country Park website: https://www.sevensisters.org.uk/we-hear-you-now/

The stories can be accessed by QR codes that appear on posts, gates and benches across the park, embedded in the landscape that inspired them. Sadly, over the summer, the plaques with the QR codes were removed. On their website, The Seven Sister Country Park states: ‘we can sadly only assume that the theft is targeted and racially-motivated, and has been reported as such to Sussex Police.’ The park has now restored the plaques. 

The walk was planned to express solidarity with the writers, to spread information about this inspiring project and to encourage more people to discover the listening posts and hear the stories. 

One of the walkers, Tony Dowmunt said it was ‘an enjoyable and stimulating walk that - particularly for a person like me with a Polish immigrant father - forcefully made the point that the channel has always been crossed by many and diverse peoples.’

Another walker, a woman of colour, told us that she was usually wary of walking in such spaces fearing she could be subjected to racial discrimination but this project given her courage. 

One of the writers who was not able to attend expressed her feelings about the walk: ‘It is really important to us that others are amplifying our voices and being ambassadors for the project. I really love that a momentum is growing around this and I hope it builds over time.’

An article about the walk appeared in the Sussex Express.