A ten-metre Lady Godiva marching at the head of a peloton; a series of LED art installations on bus shelter rooftops; a mysterious city-wide project directed by two legendary stop-motion animators; an aeroplane fuselage art-space dragged into town by local teams; a living column of sinuous white cloud rising from Liverpool’s old docks; a secret forest football pitch; an electro-acoustic tidemill powered by the River Tyne; a multi-part community art project excavating memories; a sea-going boat pieced together from tennis rackets and pianos and guitars and other sundry wood; three really big lions; a sculpture assembled from thousands of donated objects; and a nowhereisland steered by ad hoc crowdsourced governance.

The flagship project of the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Artists Taking the Lead is an ambitious £5.4 million programme funding twelve large-scale commissions – one in each of the nine English regions and one each for the nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. They are all, in some way, linked to the idea of ‘public art’ – to community and site – and are all set to culminate during the Olympic and Paralympic Games. Otherwise, they’re about as different as a collection of projects can be. Here Total Theatre takes you on a nationwide tour...