High praise for our young Park poets

by Jack Cooper, our Poet-in-Residence

Earlier this year, the Friends of Greenwich Park invited young people to write poems that celebrate the Park we all love for the inaugural Greenwich Park Poetry Competition. Poems soon flooded in from young people across Greenwich, London, and even Northern Ireland, Ghana, India, and Bangladesh. On April 19th, the Mayor of Greenwich joined the Friends and poetry lovers at the Park’s Pavilion Café to celebrate our six winners. After a warm welcome from Dr Tina Challacombe, Chair of the Friends, and Clare Lanes, Park Manager, I invited our winners to perform their poems in the spring sunshine in the Pavilion garden. When judging submissions with representatives of the Friends’ committee, we were all delighted by their quality and originality. The winning poems give some sense of the sheer variety of topics that entrants tackled, taking us to lazy summer days and frosty hillsides, asking us to look up at trees that have been growing for three centuries. Parakeets flash by line breaks, deer peek through similes. The winning poems stood out for their specificity and vivid sense of place, written with a clear point-of-view and a sense of Greenwich Park’s rich past and present. Councillor Linda Bird, the Mayor of Greenwich, said at the ceremony: ‘I want to pass on huge congratulations to the young people who wrote their poetry, and especially to the winners. On a beautiful spring day, it was my great pleasure and privilege to present these awards.’ The Mayor presented our prize entrants - three of whom were at the ceremony -with their well-deserved certificates and book tokens courtesy of the Friends of Greenwich Park. Additional gifts were kindly provided by the Poetry Society. It was heartening to see how the competition helped young people engage more deeply with Greenwich Park: reflecting on its landscapes, history, and the personal memories it holds. I look forward to seeing the creative works in our young winners’ futures.

The Winners

Age 5–12 category 

1st place: Greenwich Kingdom. by Connie Higdon, aged 10

2nd place: Frosted Morning. by Isabelle Deards, aged 11

3rd place: Glorious Greenwich Park. by Iona Smith, aged 8

Age 13–18 category 

1st place: On the Prime Meridian. by Serenity Sam-Yorke, aged 13

2nd place: Meridian en Velours. by Nandani Khichi, aged 16

3rd place: Wonders of Greenwich Park. by Thivanishah Thineshkanth, aged 14

Read our winning entries by clicking on the poem name.