Where We Are was a youth led programme from the British Museum, running from 2021 to 2025, that put young people aged 16 to 24 at the heart of shaping arts and culture where they live. Each year the British Museum chose two places across the UK and brought together a cultural organisation, a third sector organisation and a group of local young people to shape the programme together.
For the final year in 2025, Metal was chosen to lead the Peterborough programme, working with The Kite Trust, a charity supporting LGBTQ+ young people across Cambridgeshire and Peterborough. 15 local young people took part in Autumn 2025, and I was the lead artist working with the group.
When we began this project, I set out hoping to shed light on some of Peterborough’s sometimes slightly hidden arts scene, and to explore how creativity can be a form of agency and a way of responding to the world around us. Peterborough has fantastic places and people and, despite a sometimes questionable reputation, it offers so much in terms of art, heritage and culture. I am always excited to share this with others and it is something worth celebrating.
The sessions explored spoken word, alternative ways of mark making and music jamming, alongside conversations about power, youth voice and Peterborough’s creative scene.
Despite the big challenges in the world right now, many of which are already directly affecting this group of young people in their lives today, the young people engaged with optimism, critical thinking and creativity, embodying creativity as a form of agency, resistance and activist thinking.
The group visited the British Museum, many for the first time. The trip also meant that the Peterborough cohort could meet the other group of young people running at the same time in Newcastle, with Tyneside Cinema and NE Youth.
HERE WE ARE: the exhibition
The project ended with HERE WE ARE, a pop-up exhibition at Roots and Rise in Queensgate Shopping Centre, Peterborough, on 23 and 24 January 2026. The work expressed individuality, mess, union and hope, celebrating queer joy and voices that often go unheard. On the Saturday afternoon there were creative activities, performances and a discussion panel alongside the exhibition.
The exhibition was the culmination of many weeks of creative enquiry, curiosity and expression. It reflected the passion this group feels about their futures and the world around them, and it held honest and important messages. Some of the works were personal expressions that needed to be made for the young people themselves, as moments of processing, questioning, finding voice and experiencing joy. Others were outward facing and offered reflections and invitations for the rest of us to listen, reflect and take notice.
The exhibition was chosen by the group themselves as a way to share their learning and to celebrate the time they spent together. This work could just as easily have remained private and held within the group, but the decision to share it publicly reflects their passion, confidence and advocacy for change.
The title HERE WE ARE was chosen intentionally by the group, marking the present moment and where we find ourselves now. It also marks their presence and places them firmly at the front of the conversation about WHAT COMES NEXT.
I believe that it is so important that an institution like the British Museum runs work like Where We Are, engaging meaningfully with communities outside of London. At a time when funding is scarce and support for smaller creative organisations and venues is increasingly withdrawn or undervalued, this kind of commitment matters deeply. It allowed the project to breathe and develop at its own pace, without being constrained by limited time, energy or resources, or by top down expectations of a fixed outcome.
I know that some of the young people are heading into creative study in the future, and being able to say they have been part of a British Museum project is something of real value. I hope they continue to be curious, actively creative and open to opportunity, both locally and beyond.
Thank you
Where We Are was a British Museum programme supported by Paul Hamlyn Foundation, delivered in Peterborough by Metal and The Kite Trust. Thank you to Metal, The Kite Trust and the British Museum, and most of all to the young people who made and shared this work.
Read Metal’s write up of Where We Are
Find out more about the Where We Are programme at the British Museum