The ‘Go Penguins’ project has been set up by Wild in Art, the same company behind 2008’s Superlambanana initiative, who hope to populate Liverpool's streets with more than 100 of the 3ft penguin statues.

Children from over 80 schools across the region will have chance to design and paint one of the penguins, which will later form part of Liverpool’s major Christmas event ‘A Winters Trail’, which runs from November to January.

Sally Ann Wilkinson, Director of Wild in Art, said: “We chose the penguin for two reasons, one of which was because it was always going to be a Christmas type festive event, and penguins have resonance with that. Also, at the same time we wanted to link into Liverpool’s year of the environment.”

Currently, over 75 percent of Liverpool’s Primary schools have signed up to the project, and it is hoped that this figure will rise. Blackmoor Park Junior School in Fazakerley was the very first school to receive their penguin.

Gill Savage, a teacher at the school, said: “The children are really excited about it, they all want to paint the penguin and get involved - we’ve also launched a competition to name him.

"We launched our new school uniform in January and as a result we’ve decided to design our penguin with the uniform on him."

As well as the schools initiative, the organisers of Go Penguins also called on local artists to submit possible designs for larger 5ft statues. Sally Ann Wilkinson said: “We had 525 entries from artists across Merseyside. We attracted private sector sponsorship and public sector funding which enabled us then to commission over 100 of those submissions.”

All of the penguins will go towards creating mini-colonies across the city at indoor and outdoor locations, and the organisers plan to turn empty shop windows into winter wonderlands.

The project will launch on Sunday 22nd November, when the penguins will begin to crop up at various locations in the city.

Shorthand Sue

Website team