Plymouth City and the Box: St Luke's Guiding Lights, Wild in Art

The sculptures in this art trail can be seen until September 13th 2026.  The lighthouses will be auctioned on the 1st October 2026.

St Luke's is a hospice in Plymouth providing end of life care.  It entirely relies on charitable donations in order to keep running.  The proceeds raised by this art trail will ensure St Luke's continues to have the funding it requires to provide it's invaluable services but it is also a great community event.

The centrepiece of the exhibition is a series of lighthouses installed around the city.  Over a hundred artists submitted their ideas of how they would like to decorate the lighthouses.  The charity in partnership with the event sponsors, selected the successful entries.  

The resulting 40+ large lighthouses have been placed all over the city.  The most northerly on is at the main train station and they stretch downwards from there in a rough triangle to the sea.  The western most corner is at Royal William Yard and the most eastern is at the Barbican Retail Park.  There is also one at Mount Batten.

In addition there are smaller 1 metre tall lighthouses that have been decorated by schools and community groups.  These are situated at the Box and are free to visit there.  There are a further ten 1 metre lighthouses that form a roaming exhibition visiting various sites such as Dartmoor Zoo.  The roaming exhibition lighthouses are individually sponsored and are artist designed.

You can also buy your own small lighthouse to decorate.  There is a variety of other merchandise for sale, mostly at the St Luke's charity shops I think, but there is a childrens book called Lukey the Lighthouse Finds His Light, also available in the online shop.

The sponsors of the event vary from organisations with a vested interest in supporting both the city and tourism to the city and companies looking to publicly support a worthwhile charity.  Some of these organisations have also donated a reward or offer that is associated with the lighthouse they have sponsored.

The result is beautiful art sculptures to hunt down around the city and there is no cost to just look at them.  They really do look lovely and bright and cheerful.

If you do want to see them all, you can either download the app, or get a paper map from a St Luke's Charity shop.  Both options cost £2.  As this money goes to such a great charity, it was an easy choice for me to make to buy the app. 

The app has a map you can zoom and move that shows all the lighthouses placed around Plymouth.  You can collect each lighthouse in the app by finding the four digit code on the base of that lighthouse and entering it in to the app.  This should automatically unlock any rewards in the app.  

I found collecting the lighthouses could be a little glitchy with them not always unlocking and rewards not automatically being granted.  In the FAQ section, it was suggested that this could be caused by auto connecting to public wifi as well as being on the 5G network.  It was suggested to log out and log back in again and this fixed the issue for me.

I don't think it is easy as a visitor to collect all the lighthouses!  It would take me multiple visits to be able to visit all the locations and there are more than a few places I have never visited, such as Mount Batten and Royal William Yard.  Yes, these places are on my to do list now I am travelling more by train.  The other issue for me has been the heat, I don't enjoy it much at all and it has definitely reduced the number of visits to Plymouth I would have made in this time.

On this visit I also visited KARST and the Box from the train station, using the number 21 bus from Royal Parade.  I collected ten large sculptures around the city centre, but saw another three from a distance.  I also saw all of the little lighthouses at the Box.  I really enjoyed seeing all the lighthouses and it was obvious other people were enjoying them as well.  I look forward to collecting a few more lighthouses!

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