In what may seem like the final leg of a journey towards respectability, street artist Matt Sewell has put the finishing touches to his latest commission:  promotional material for the National Trust’s Sounds of Our Shores project. 

The three month project, launched today, is set to create the first ever UK coastal sound map, using sounds recorded by the public.  A collaboration between the National Trust, the British Library and the National Trust for Scotland, the project will run throughout the summer of 2015, closing on the 21 September.

It seems a far cry from the Old Moor underpass, where I first came across Matt’s work.  Old Moor is an RSPB reserve among the former coal mining villages of Barnsley.  In 2010 the RSPB brought Matt in to work with art students from local schools and colleges to brighten up a concrete underpass that was part of the nearby TransPennine Trail.  The project was so successful that two more graffiti art projects were commissioned along the trail.

Since then, Matt has gone on to author several bird books in which his unique visual take is matched by succinct descriptions that capture a deep, if offbeat, relationship between artist and subject.

Earlier this year Matt added his voice to the chorus of protest that greeted the deletion of over fifty nature words from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, covered on several occasions by NATURAL LIGHT.  It was then that I called him to try to understand what makes him tick.

“I’d been a street artist since the late 1990s” he explained, “and started working for fashion mags and the like but by 2007 I’d just had enough.  My wife and I were living in Brighton and one day we just left and went to Australia, just travelling around a lot.”

While in Australia he carried on with street art, “some official, some unofficial” but realised that all he really wanted to do was watch birds.  I asked if he had been a birdwatcher up to that point.  “I think it was when I was watching a splendid fairy wren in Australia, a wonderful blue thing, that I had a flash of realisation how much I loved birds.”  He realised he had been passionate about them since growing up alongside his family’s smallholding in Willington, County Durham.

“We came back to the UK and I decided to devote most of my work to birds” he says, “but found we were in the middle of the credit crunch and all my old contacts had moved on.”  His Australian adventures made him look afresh at everyday British birds.  “I saw how blue a blue tit is and thought, wow! it’s a British bird.”  

Matt’s work caught the eye of Jeff Barrett, founder of the website Caught by the River, who asked him to design a logo.  That led to a regular contribution, Matt Sewell’s Bird of the Week.  “I had to start the series with the blue tit, as it has become my favourite bird” he says.  "I painted the bird and added a couple of sentences, it was the first thing I ever wrote."

His commentary on the house sparrow, an early subject of the series, is typical:  As British as chip butties and bramble picking, they even look like they’re wearing a flat cap for Christ’s sake. When you see them abroad they don’t look right, like they shouldn’t be there. Faded, out of place and a bit sad. Like some leathery Brit that’s been in Ibiza/Thailand/Goa for far, far too long and lost their way. Come home!

A book of such gems was inevitable, and Ebury Press published Our Garden Birds in 2012.  “It’s just a collection of musings and memories of encounters I have had with these birds,” he explains, “but at the same time I’m trying to give people a different understanding of the countryside and wildlife.  Trying to open people’s eyes.” 

The National Trust’s Sounds of Our Shores project, for which Matt has contributed the artwork, including the logo at the top of this blog, now hopes to open people’s ears, too.

The three participants were united by their anger.  Jeremy Deller is the artist whose six-room exhibition English Magic at the 2013 Venice Biennale included a painting of a giant hen harrier clutching a Range Rover.  As symbols of the unequal struggle between oppressor and oppressed, they were well chosen, not least because the painting was a direct response to Deller's anger at the news of the shooting of two hen harriers at the royal estate in Sandringham.

Presenter Chris Packham is well known for stepping into the firing line over illegal bird killing, on behalf of both hen harriers and migrant birds in Malta.  George Monbiot's assessment chimed with Deller's skillfully-wrought artistic response:  the only people who want hen harriers to go extinct are the landowners who have the means to make it happen, but no popular support.  The ones with all the popular support have no power to stop them.

The trio went on to critique Packham's own artistic efforts - good third year stuff according to Deller - and the role of the BBC and Sir David Attenborough in projecting the reality - or otherwise - of the threats facing the planet.  The programme is available on the BBC iPlayer, and well worth an hour of anyone's time.

The East Neuk Festival (27 June – 5 July) has been going since 2004 and has always revelled in its location:  the beautiful Fife coast and its many harbour villages. Its weekend festival-within-a-festival Littoral is a celebration of our profound connections with nature, landscape and seascape. 

Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain has become a beacon of place-writing for two generations of writers.  On 27 June Poet Tom Pow leads a discussion on this extraordinary work.  Later in the day Pow returns for a conversation with Helen Macdonald, winner of this year’s prestigious Samuel Johnson Prize, who will discuss her book H is for Hawk.


After talks from wildlife photographer Laurie Campbell and conservationist Sir John Lister Kaye a closing panel discussion led by writer James Robertson will ask: what is the relationship between a place and its observer?

The following day Lister-Kaye and writer Mark Cocker explore Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water and its impact on nature writers more than half a century after it was first published.  

Neck of the Woods is written by New York-based novelist and playwright Veronica Gonzalez Peña.  NATURAL LIGHT will review the opening night, July 10 and Neck of the Woods is on seven dates until 18 July.


For ticket details of all events click on the festival links or visit our What’s On page.

Coming up this month:  poet James Giddings leads a fun exploration of poetry and birds in this family friendly drop-in workshop. James will be inspiring visitors to the RSPB Bempton Cliffs reserve to re-create the sounds of Bempton. Part of the Bridlington Poetry Festival 12-21 June.

13 June 11am-3pm, RSPB Bempton Cliffs.  Free (entry charge to reserve for non-members).

Bempton Cliffs is the best place in England to see, hear and smell seabirds!  Each year, 250,000 of them flock to the cliffs between Bempton and Flamborough in East Yorkshire to find a mate and raise their young.

From April to August, the cliffs are alive with nest-building adults or young chicks taking their first faltering steps. With huge numbers to watch, beginners can easily learn the difference between gannets, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes and fulmars.

See our What's On page for more nature-inspired events around the UK.