The winners of Nexus’ National Pottery Day competition have gone on display at Longbenton station on the Tyne and Wear Metro. One winner and three runners-up are now on display at the station which has more than one million passengers travel through it every year.
The competition was launched last October and asked people to submit entries on the theme of “home”. A judging panel containing Nexus staff and local poets Anna Woodford and John Challis studied 182 entries of which four were deemed worthy of going on display.
The winning poem was written by Jenny Carter from Newcastle, with a poem entitled “Sanddancer”. She commented: “This was a lovely opportunity, and I was shocked when I found out I won. It’s so nice to see my poem up at the station. All my poetry is about my family, my mam is from South Shields and she was the inspiration behind this one, she cried when I told her about it!”
The runners-up were Susan Shepherd, from the Scottish borders, Helen Kay, from Cheshire and Jane Burn, from Consett. Jenny won £100 in Waterstones vouchers and membership of the Poetry Book Society with the runners-up receiving £50 Waterstones vouchers each.
Huw Lewis, Nexus Customer Services Director, said: “Metro has a long history of displaying art on the network. Placing art and poetry in public places like train stations, where people don’t expect to see it, is a great way of introducing it to the public. We’ve seen a steady growth in interest in the poetry station at Longbenton since we began this project two years’ ago, and I’ll be fascinated to see how the project develops in the next few years. The standard of poems has been exceptional, and I hope our customers enjoy reading them as much as I did.”
The poems will remain on display until the spring.