Thursday, May 11, 2017

Arts Council grant for the Richard Jefferies Museum


Good news from Swindon Link. The Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate has receive a donation of £55,000 from the Arts Council towards a programme of arts and heritage activities.

The website quotes a couple of reactions:
Hilda Sheehan, who organises most of the museum's events as well as being a poet and mainstay of the Swindon Poetry Festival, said: "This is such good news for us. We are a tiny museum and really want to reach as many people as possible. Having a grant from the Arts Council means we can bring in really good artists and internationally renowned poets and not have to charge the earth for people to enjoy them."
Museum manager Mike Pringle said: "We have only been developing the museum for a relatively short while after taking it over from the Council. This helps us to go even further, developing local arts and heritage through our relationships with local services such as the Alzheimer's Society, the Downs Syndrome Society, Mind, local schools, community groups, libraries and galleries. We think that arts which respond to this sort of audience participation grow in new and unexpected ways, and bring our museum to life."
The museum occupies Coate Farm, which was the birthplace of the 19th-century nature writer Richard Jefferies.

For more on the man and the location see the guest post on Liberal England by Rebecca Welshman. It was written before the museum's recent renaissance.

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