A TWO-MILE trail around Hereford’s new public artworks is now available online and in printed form for residents and visitors to follow.

The “easy” loop of the city centre “takes about one hour to complete at a moderate pace”, its backer Herefordshire Council said.

The latest addition is a series of eight sculptures by artists from Hereford College of Arts (HCA) or with other links to Hereford, working with local charity Meadow Arts.

Listen to what local democracy reporter Gavin McEwan had to say below.

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These repurpose disused sign brackets around the city’s historic core, and are inspired old laws requiring shops to display visual representations of their trades.

The eight are:

  • Cloud Palette #1 by Matthew Cornford, in Palace Yard opposite the cathedral, echoes a paint palette design formerly used on materials promoting the city’s art school.
  • Drawing on costumes and flags of bygone times, the abstract Diamond by German-born Lothar Götz harks back to Broad Street’s rich history of festivities.
  • The Sturgeon and the Artist by Nicholas Stevenson, at the corner of High Town and Widemarsh Street, takes its inspiration from a giant sturgeon caught in the city in 1846, in order to “capture the elusive essence of creativity”.
  • Unleashed in Widemarsh Street “explores what wrought iron may do if it were free to go its own way”, according to its creator Laura White.
  • Across Widemarsh Street, Bangin’ the Drum by Mark Houghton pays tribute to the iconic black-and-white kit of The Pretenders’ Hereford-born drummer Martin Chambers.
  • Wonders in Trinity Square, by Celia Johnson with Wigmore High School pupils, is inspired by the Hereford-born actor David Garrick's famous saying, “Wonders will never cease”.
  • Symbolising Herefordshire’s farming “backbone”, the skeletal metal form of Plough by Daniel Moss in Church Street suggests the body of a community.
  • Also in Church Street, the “machine aesthetic” of HR101 by Rich Makin takes inspiration from Hereford’s manufacturing heritage.

The sculptures join eight recently unveiled murals by national and international street artists now also dotted around the city.

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These are:

  • Cattles and Apples at The Herdsman pub, on the corner of Widemarsh Street and the A438 Blue School Street. Fusing flora and fauna is the trademark style of spray-paint artist Curtis Hylton, here celebrating the county’s farming heritage.
  • Ancestral Memory at The Commercial pub in Commercial Road is inspired by Herefordshire’s history and folklore, centred around the 5,000-year-old Arthur’s Stone burial chamber in the Golden Valley.
  • Forever Flowers (Shifting Borders) at the Eign Gate underpass depicts locally-found flowers, blown up to suggest an insect's perspective.
  • Our Wild Heart at Bastion Mews, Commerical Street is also inspired by the flora of the meadows that straddle Herefordshire's river Wye.
  • Tom at the Booth Hall Passage draws on the history of the Booth Hall Hotel and its former landlord.
  • Another typography-based mural, Every Corner Holds a Memory covers one wall of Union Passage, off Commerical Street.
  • With its abstract vegetable forms, The People’s Patch in Capuchin Lane references the passageway's former name of Cabbage lane.
  • Forget Me Not in Brewer’s Passage beside the Maylord Orchards shopping centre has a female figure among wildflowers, which are also being grown in a small plot in front.