If you go down to Birmingham today, you’re sure of a big surprise, since 137 sun bear cubs have taken up residence at cultural and heritage sites across the city and beyond. Designed and decorated by local schoolchildren, these ursine invaders are the first part of a project aimed at raising funds for and awareness of the vital work of Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

Launched this week, The Little Bears Detective Club is the educational arm of the punningly named Big Sleuth (“sleuth” being, apparently, the collective noun for a group of bears) – the follow-up to 2015’s The Big Hoot which, through the eventual sale of its owl sculptures, generated over £500,000 towards a brand new diseases centre at the hospital.

As excited kids flocked to the unveiling of their multicoloured creations at Millennium Point on Wednesday, we spoke to some of the brains behind the bears to find out why they hope the scheme will prove to be a roaring success.

“After The Big Hoot a couple of years ago, we knew we had to do something again and we knew we had to go even bigger,” says Louise McCathie, Director of Fundraising at Birmingham Women’s and Children’s Hospital. “This time we’ve expanded outside of Birmingham to Sutton Coldfield, Sandwell and Solihull as well.”

Like its owl-themed predecessor, The Big Sleuth will centre on a trail of huge, adult human-sized sculptures, each individually customised by professional artists to be auctioned off for charity after ten weeks on display in public places. Where The Big Hoot contributed to the creation of the UK's first and only rare diseases centre for children, however, money raised from The Big Sleuth will be used in a wide variety of different ways. 

“The money that’s raised from this will help us to invest in everything from new technology to new play areas so children can have a better experience while they’re staying with us,” says Dr Chris Chiswell, Consultant in Public Health Medicine, Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust. “We’re looking to make a big investment in research and innovation, and we’re also hoping to get some new, high-tech investigation equipment, which will improve how quickly we’re able to diagnose children, as well as looking at whether we’re able to treat them in less invasive ways.”

The Little Bears Detective Club, meanwhile, is less about fundraising than having fun, bringing local schools and youth groups on board to design smaller versions of the sculptures (around 3ft tall), which will then be returned to the schools they came from at the end of the summer.

“We’re launching the Little Bears Detective Club a week and a half ahead of the main trail launch on 10 July,” explains Annie Laughrin, Arts and Learning Programme Manager for The Big Sleuth and partner organisation Wild in Art. “The children here today have been involved since November last year – we held an open call-out and we now have over 30,000 children from 137 different schools on board.”

Each bear sculpture is entirely unique: with groups having been given total free reign to interpret the brief in their own way, the result is a dazzling array of designs as vibrant and diverse as the city itself.

“The sculptures have been made by professionals, but design-wise, every group has done things very differently,” says McCathie. “Some have had assistance from artists, some have got their own talented teachers to help, and some have been done entirely by the children themselves.”

“We didn’t sign off on any of them – the only thing we asked was that they didn’t use any corporate logos,” adds Laughrin. “A lot of them have been designed through competitions with elements taken from the winners, while some schools have used some of their pupil premium money to get involved. Yew Tree Community School was actually sponsored by Millennium Point, who paid for them to have an artist, Milan Topolovic, come in and work with them. They chose to focus on the habitats of the sun bears that inspired the sculptures, so there’s a beautiful tree design with decoupage leaves done by the children.”

The ecology of the Malayan sun bear is one of the main strands of The Big Sleuth’s accompanying learning programme, with lesson plans and resources supplied to participating schools along with the blank sculptures ready for decorating. Along with more high-profile animals like the orangutan and Sumatran tiger, the sun bear is among the many species now endangered due to large-scale deforestation and habitat destruction in Southeast Asia.

Framed around the story of a lost bear looking for a better life in Britain, there’s more than a whiff of Paddington about the narrative of The Little Bears Detective Club – a connection made all the more poignant by the death of Michael Bond earlier this week. And just like Paddington finds a home in London, where no one stands out because everyone is different, there are carefully thought-through reasons why a foreign, tree-loving creature might decide to settle in the UK's second city.

“The idea is that he’s travelled to Birmingham because he’s heard that it’s a very inclusive place and also that it’s the city of trees, so it’s somewhere he can come and meet lots of other bear friends,” says Laughrin. “Also, this year is Birmingham’s celebration year of South Asian culture, so a lot of schools have been inspired by South Asian culture in their designs.”

If Birmingham being an unusually leafy city is news to you, you’re not alone. It might not be as familiar a claim to fame as the extensive canal network, but Birmingham allegedly boasts more parks and trees than almost any other European city. This lesser-known local tidbit is just one of many things that bear hunters will have the chance to find out about their city on the Big Sleuth trail, so even if overseas conservation isn’t high on your list of interests, there’s still plenty to discover by taking part.

“The city and the surrounding area have changed so much over the last few years, so this gives families a brilliant opportunity to get out and explore places they’ve never been to before,” says Chiswell. “We’re offering people something that’s free and fun, easy and accessible to everyone that they can go out and do together.”

And, as McCathie points out, exploring is also good for your mental and physical health:

“There’s a really key public health message that we’re getting across, getting people to really enjoy family time and getting active as well,” she says.

“I think my favourite memory of The Big Hoot was watching people about my age who are perhaps not so great at exercising being dragged around by enthusiastic children, who had clearly only meant to see ten sculptures but had ended up seeing 23,” adds Chiswell. “This is addictive and fun, and it will make you forget that you’re exercising because you’ll just be enjoying it.”

And in the words of Birmingham Lord Mayor Councillor Anne Underwood, who brought along her own bear, Declan, to help her launch the project, “Everybody loves a teddy bear – whatever their age – don’t they?”

“These bears are extremely huggable – they’ve certainly been tested today!” agrees McCathie. “It was important to us to choose something that would appeal to all ages, and I think it works really well with the connection to the children’s hospital.”

“One of the knock-on effects we found with The Big Hoot was that people came from all over the world to see them,” adds Underwood. “We had people from Australia, the States, from China and Japan, who were in the UK and decided to visit Birmingham and have a look at the owls – it gives them a reason to come other than just the shops. So it all helps the local economy too.”

Even the little bears have the potential to make a big impact, then – who needs Pokémon GO when you can hunt down colourful creatures on the streets for real? But if you want to catch a big one, you’ll have to wait until the official Big Sleuth launch on Monday 10 July...!

For more information and to view the full trail map, visit www.thebigsleuth.co.uk.