The Story of HMS Hopeless. The Cardboard City Project

For the Cardboard City Project we first got into a group of five, My group consisted of Holly Barrett, Grace Crawford, Mimi Hayles, Caleb Toms and myself. To begin the project we split the group in two to get inspiration of the City of Plymouth from different perspectives. Holly, Grace and myself went to the top of Regent Street Carpark where as Mimi and Caleb went to Plymouth Hoe.

From the Carpark the three of us could see a lot of architecture and nature:

(I used a panoramic image to illustrate the amount of diversity we could see) 

From here we created sketches of what we could see:

I choose a church steeple, an architecturally unique rooftop and the diagonal panels on Drake Circus.

When we joined again as a group Mimi and Caled mentioned that they'd seen boats which inspired them, so we mixed together all of our ideas and produced a cardboard model: 

It turned out being a boat, church, rooftop hybrid that we were all very happy with but in reflection it may have been a bit optimistic.

The next day we began building our model...

...and with a few minor tweeks we were ready throw as much parcel and masking tape at as much cardboard we could get our hands on to make this hybrid stewed from our imaginations a reality...but by the end of a day of pure hard graft, this was the outcome...

It'd completely sunk in on itself and seemed pretty unsalvageable, ironically similar to the Titanic. 

So despite the previous disaster we scraped the ruins from the floor and soldiered on and with some major tweeks of scrapping the hybrid and purely making a cardboard boat a miracle happened and in just 3 hours a new and improved uniquely painted model arose from the ashes named...HMS Hopeless. Because although we'd achieve the impossible we had little hope of our little Hopeless surviving for much longer.

 

We were right.

Megan Chilcott