West Midlands half term activities to keep your children busy
Birmingham and Black Country
Animal lovers can head to Forge Mill Farm in West Bromwich for lambing week, where they can explore the barns and and meet some of the new born lambs and kids.A forest school is also being held at the Castle Bromwich Historic Gardens where both children and their parents can explore nature.For those more artistically minded, there are free family and community crafts sessions being held at the Roundhouse Birmingham across the week.The Birmingham Botanical Gardens is also hosting a Gardens Art Club, during which they will be exploring the beauty of winter flowers.More activities and events are listed on the Visit Birmingham website.
Coventry and Warwickshire
Coventry Transport Museum has encouraged families to explore its "open-ended play environment" for children who love everything transport.The Blitz Museum is also reopening for half term, giving youngsters and adults an opportunity to explore what life was like for people living through the Coventry Blitz in 1940. Meanwhile, Kenilworth Castle will be putting on its half-term history makers event, with bZents Theatre Company presenting Tales of Robin Hood.Stratford Butterfly Farm will also have their leafcutter ants, which arrived at the farm in August, on display throughout the week.
Herefordshire
Herefordshire County Council has outlined a number of activities for families taking place at the Black and White House Museum in Hereford.These include the Hoard at the House Trail, where visitors can uncover hidden treasures of the county's past, and a Bank Heist Trail. Replicas from the Herefordshire Hoard will also be viewable as part of a display encouraging people to learn the history behind the items and their discovery.And exclusive tours will see the museum's curators talking people through the historical significance of the hoard.
Worcestershire
Attwell Farm Park in Redditch will be offering families a chance to meet its new arrivals while children can take advantage of the sand play area.The Living History Festival will also be taking place at the Commandery in Worcester on 22 and 23 February, with the chance to watch military displays and re-enactors throughout the museum and gardens.West Midlands Safari Park in Bewdley is hosting its character week with children able to meet their favourite TV characters, including Bluey and Peppa Pig.
Shropshire
There are activities planned over half-term in connection with the Darwin Shrewsbury Festival, celebrating the birth of the town's most famous son Charles Darwin.A Lego workshop, fossils and educational talks, will be held at various venues around the town.Families taking part in Shrewsbury Parkrun will also be asked to get into the spirit by wearing Darwin-inspired outfits.
Staffordshire
The activities suggested by Staffordshire County Council include the Pirate Takeover at Alton Towers Resort throughout the week.The authority also recommended searching for fairies in the vast gardens of the Trentham Estate as well as visiting the Trentham Monkey Forest next door.Visitors can also get up close with the farmyard animals and let off some steam in the play areas at Lower Drayton Farm, near Penkridge.Meanwhile, families can explore the beautiful woodland in Cannock Chase Forest as well as tackle the pedal and play beginners mountain bike trail.Other activities include making a splash on the flumes at Waterworld in Hanley, hitting the slopes of the Snowdome in Tamworth and getting your hands dirty at the National Forest Adventure Farm in Burton.
Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton Art Gallery has a number of family-friendly events taking place throughout the week.These include the opportunity for visitors to create their own AI-generated portrait of a fisherman on Wednesday in the style of Sam Wootton's Men Holding Fish series.Adults and children can also drop into the gallery on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday to help the team create an animated film about "greening the city". Metallic wing-making will be held on Thursday too, with budding artists able to learn embossed foil art techniques to make their own majestic, wearable wings.
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DS Did you always know that you wanted to work in paint? JS I always painted or made things from a young age. The permission for creativity was strong in my upbringing. My parents were teachers and would encourage creativity. DS In a lot of ways, you were the one who gave me my first creative awakening. Growing up in Glasgow, I'd never been to a museum or a gallery. A couple of art teachers at school could see I was struggling. One night after school, they said: 'Look, just come with us,' and took me up to the Glasgow School of Art to the 1992 degree show. A lot of it was lost on me, because I was only a kid. But then I turned the corner and there was Propped, and although I didn't understand all the layers of it, I was blown away. In that one moment, your work changed the course of my entire life. JS Was that the first time you went to the building? DS First time. I grew up less than a mile away from it and hardly knew it existed. Even if I had, I would have been intimidated; working-class kids don't always feel that they're invited into those circles. When I was writing [Douglas's 2020 debut novel] Shuggie Bain, I looked at Trace (1993–94) a lot. It was an image that I had of Shuggie when he takes off his mother's bra to care for her because she can't care for herself, and he's looking at her back, at the lines left in the flesh, and rubbing them and hoping they would lift. As if he could erase them, he could take away some of her pain. JS Hilary Robinson, my theory tutor for my dissertation, had written an essay where she said: 'A body is not a neutral ground of meaning but a copper plate to be etched.' DS Those paintings were helpful in slowing me down. They ask us to observe closely. They challenged me to write about bodies in a similar way, and it's essential because the body is a very political thing. It's often the only thing that my characters have: their bodies are shaped by what they do, and their lives are shaped by how they use their bodies to survive. JS There's a lot of attention concentrated on our bodies. You see that shift in the high street, the way the shops change over the years: you used to have a post office, a stationer's, a butcher; now many have transitioned to nail bars, tanning salons, tattoo parlours. DS I was at a university a couple of weeks ago to do a reading of Shuggie Bain. It's only five years old but I can't yet look back on him with fondness. All I wanted to do was rewrite the book. I wished I had a red pen. Do you look back with kindness? With fondness? JS Fondness sometimes, or I find my fearless naivety a bit amusing. Often I hear the music that was playing at the time, look at passages of paint and remember making that mark, the size of brush I used, the feeling inside. When I see my paintings I often think: 'Oh, that part worked, but maybe I should have put another bridging tone there.' People say: 'Oh, that's a great painting,' and you think: 'It's not as good as it was in my head.' DS It's similar with writing: your audience encounters the finished artefact and they don't see the journey and the loneliness. JS I wouldn't call it loneliness. I enjoy making paintings. DS I find writing very lonely because I worked for 20 years in fashion. Now, writing in contrast to fashion feels incredibly lonely because I sit around and talk to imaginary people all day. JS Do you have a routine? DS I find that imaginary people are chattiest in the mornings, so I try to get up at six o'clock and I work till two or three in the afternoon. How about you? JS I've had different working rhythms and routines in my life. Recently I've been getting up about 6.30 in the morning and then I'll paint until I feel that lull, which tends to be around four, and then I might do another session. I like painting eyes first thing in the morning. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion DS Why is that? JS Because my concentration's at its highest, so I tend to paint details like teeth and eyes first thing in the morning, when I'm sharp. DS One of the things that speaks to me the most about your work is your journey with colour. It has evolved so much. In the early work I can actually feel Glasgow in the paintings. JS Glasgow can have beautiful light. My first home there was on Hill Street, and you'd look over toward the flats and mountains and see this silvery light. I've never seen it anywhere else quite the same way. Over the last few years I've thought much more about nature and light. I'd travel, look at other approaches to painting. I went to Paris and New York and saw how [Willem] de Kooning painted flesh and thought: 'What great colours and fluidity.' Then after 11 September and the Iraq war, we were flooded with images that had a lot of intense colour and emotion and I responded to the atmosphere of that time. My work evolved and I started using ranges of red and blue pigments, for example, like in my Stare heads. If you're curious you experiment, and on that journey you discover possibilities. DS The same in writing. You've got to write through it, to free yourself of it, and then get to the thing that you've got no idea that you were heading toward. You're feeling a character and you're not quite sure what they're going to do, so you build this world for them and then you see how they react. JS It's been said before, but it's probably impossible to make the perfect work. I often think: 'That's almost what I meant, that's got something.' And this moves you forward to the next painting. DS Truth is essential in writing. And there's power in writing truths that people would rather leave unsaid – maybe like depicting a body that some might rather not see? I must admit, I was horrified looking back at the journalism around some of your earlier work, and the fact that reviewers would use the word 'grotesque' to describe it. Obviously those works haven't changed, but the world around us keeps shifting, so hopefully reactions have changed as well. Has that journey been interesting to you, or do you not pay attention to it? JS I just get on with my work. You can't predict how work will be perceived. And you evolve as well. In the early 90s there were fewer spaces to show, and only a small minority of artists got major platforms. Now art is exhibited from all over the world and different voices are being heard. And then once you've been accepted, it's like, you've won the Booker prize, you can't stay annoyed about that. DS I felt really overwhelmed by the feeling of being on the outside and nobody knowing me. And then suddenly everybody looked at me like: 'Where the hell did you just come from?' There was 15 years of work behind my novels so I hadn't just arrived, I'd just been quietly over there where no one was paying attention to me. I miss that. JS It's important to have time to develop, be playful, use your imagination. I'm often judged on those early degree show works and I've developed my painting a lot since then. You have to make the work the way it should be. You can't make work to appease people who have written a bad review. And if you're mature about it, the bad review of a new body of work is OK. DS That's very big of you. I'm not sure I'm quite there yet. That's why the world is so nostalgic for the 90s: a time before the internet, for that sense of being by ourselves inside our own lives, without constant commentary and feedback. I'm fascinated by what Cy Twombly told you once about working: about trying to be ignored for as long as you can in your career, which is so smart. JS By the time he'd told me that, everybody wanted to know Cy, to show his work and talk to him. And your impulse is to look at that with admiration, but I could see there was a kind of suffering in his words, because you need to concentrate, you need time to play, and that's probably why he worked in isolated places, so he could focus. You can't have judgment when you play. You want to be like that child sitting on the floor making a painting when nobody cares: that's the most precious thing because it's a space without judgment, and you need to feel that. DS You've got to retreat from the world. But was your early success overwhelming at 22, or did it just feel like permission? JS Many opportunities happened in a short space of time. I was fortunate to sell my degree show, which was the first time I had enough money to work for a prolonged period. I had this run of wonderful things happen. And as I moved forward I just said to myself: 'Get this work right, make this work the best you can.' I stayed quiet and concentrated. And that's the lesson I learned: that the prize is the journey. Working and enjoying life's opportunities with family and friends is the prize. Jenny Saville: The Anatomy of Painting is at the National Portrait Gallery, London, to 7 September, then tours the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth Texas, from 12 October - 18 January 2026. Douglas Stuart's next novel, John of John, will be published by Picador on 26 May 2026.
