Street Hunt - could your road hold the key to the treasure?

To take part, you'll need to get yourself a Street Hunt book. Priced at £6, these books will be available to buy in The Book Stop from Saturday July 9th 2022 (pre-orders available online soon - watch this space). Once you have your book, you will be able to begin your search. You can hunt as a group, as a bunch of friends, as a family, or simply by yourself.

You will be looking for the road signs shown in photographs but with the vital name of the street blanked out. The aim is to figure out the missing names and then add them to the book. The street names reveal a poem and you can use the surroundings and the poem’s emerging story to help you.

The first person or group to submit a correctly completed book with all the right answers wins. The more people that play the game and join Street Hunt, the bigger the prize. There’s a guaranteed minimum prize of £1,000 and a maximum of £6,000 if all the books are sold.

Street Hunt is the brain child of artist Joshua Sofaer. Joshua is no stranger to the area having previously worked with us and the people of St Helens on the Your Name Here project, which saw the renaming of Ravenhead Greenway Park as Vera Page Park. For Street Hunt, Joshua travelled across the borough to find streets he could craft a poem from and captured photographs of the street signs as clues. Joshua previously ran the project in Colchester and Norfolk. The winner in Norfolk was a nurse who did it with her partner. They used the money to go on a holiday to East Asia.

Joshua says:

“It's wonderful to see this project being realised nearly two years after it was originally planned. It was pleasure to be able to to travel around St Helens, discovering more about the town and the wider borough. There are all sorts of interesting stories to be discovered in the streets and their names. How well do you know St Helens?"