Grangetopia : Claiming the Right to Happiness

Samantha was an artist in residence @ The Grange in partnership with LeftCoast between May 20237 to May 2025 exploring Grange Park’s greenspaces and people’s histories. With residents, Samantha is testing ideas to utilize the @ The Grange’s fruit orchards within the estate, along with drawing on the heritage of Symbols Biscuits to develop a range of ice-creams and hand-crafted products. The aim is in prototyping a new community social enterprise is to connect Blackpool’s beach economy to Grange Park, as a catalyst to explore how a community can claim its right to happiness and create a their own Grangetopia.

During Samantha Jones’s artists in residence @The Grange Sam have begun to see the Grange as her happy place a place where people work together for each other, a place of abundance, beauty and care. Through the people she met and in taking part in what goes on @The Grange she began to see the potential to work towards a collective Grangetopia…. were a community could dare to enact the impossible, to discover how to create their own utopia.  So, she began collaborating with Sheila, Jennifer, Rebekah, Cath, Brenda, Libby and Yvonne and asked them to go in a journey together to explore their right to happiness.

The images exhibited @TheGrange stem from the question Samantha asked “What Makes you Happy?’.  Happiness, that is an enduring state of mind consisting not only of feelings of joy, contentment , and other positive emotions, but also a sense that one is meaningful and valued. (Prof. Sonja Lyubomirsky). With their individual responses we see the manifestation of this happiness; initially through the beautiful crowns they made with Liza Lane which hold the visual representation of what brings them joy and the photographs you see, by Claire Griffiths set in a both a studio and in a place that reflects their own sense of happiness. The words and quotes exhibited with the images are what each person expressed about this journey and experience what it means to claim their right to happiness.

The aim of this collaboration is to grow small revolutions as ‘Wellbeing for all is not a Dream’. Peter Kropotkin and to have the temerity to declare that all have the right to to be happy, valued and to life full of joy and meaning. This exhibition is the beginning of our small revolution, as we are collectively working towards creating a community ice-cream company to bring a ‘Taste of Happiness’ to the Grange and Blackpool, using seasonal produce grown in and around @The Grange as one step further towards our Grangetopia.

Grangetopia: Claiming the Right to Happiness was commissions by Left Coast in collaboration with Groundworks and @The Grange.

Portrait photographes by photographer Claire Griffiths, workshop photographs by Donna Hanningan