Gloucester History Festival to receive £12.5K from second round of the Government’s Culture Recovery Fund

Gloucester History Festival has received a grant of £12.5K from the Government’s £1.57 billion Culture Recovery Fund to help the organisation recover and develop their future offer.

More than £300 million has been awarded to thousands of cultural organisations across the country including Gloucester History Festival in the latest round of support from the Culture Recovery Fund, the Culture Secretary announced today.

Gloucester History Festival is committed to bringing history to life for everyone. They present an annual two week festival to celebrate the city’s rich history, heritage and culture. The festival celebrates local, national and international history through a highly acclaimed programme of Blackfriars Talks; the City

Voices programme of workshops, performances, tours, parades, exhibitions and digital content; the Heritage Open Days and the much loved Gloucester Day, to give people the chance to learn from the past and shape their life today for the future. During 2020 the festival took place online, providing history and culture to people in their homes.

With the first Culture Recovery Fund grant, Gloucester History Festival has been able to develop an online Spring festival, which will bring history and culture to homes near and far from April 17th-18th.

The festival presents a programme of talks from historians including Greg Jenner, Janina Ramirez, Tim Marshall, Robert Pike and Katja Hoyer. The festival also offers an array of special experiences, enabling people to engage with the past in different ways, from rare opportunities to see Gloucester’s historic venues virtually to singing historical songs, and an interview with Vanley Burke.

This second Culture Recovery Fund award will support the Gloucester History Festival to prepare, secure and develop an exciting programme of events for the autumn on the theme of Frontiers and Pioneers, to mark a year which sees a multitude of significant anniversaries of frontiers and pioneers of all kinds. 2021 includes anniversaries of the end of the USSR 30 years ago, the building of the Berlin Wall and Yuri Gagarin’s first manned space flight 60 years ago, the Battle of the Imjin River during the Korean War 70 years ago and, much further back, this May marks the 550th anniversary of Gloucester’s city gates closing against Margaret of Anjou as she approached Gloucester before the Battle of Tewkesbury in 1471.

The Culture Recovery Fund will support the development of an autumn festival full of stories of crossing boundaries, new discoveries, change and advancements of the past. A festival to re-unite local communities and empower all generations to explore history and develop their understanding of the world, both past and present.

Jacqui, Gloucester History Festival Manager, said: “We are delighted to have the support of the Culture Recovery Fund. This grant is the much needed support we needed to develop an inspiring festival for the autumn. A festival for our communities to come together, develop their understanding of the world, both past and present and learn about the Frontiers and Pioneers that have shaped all of our stories.”