City updates

The Duke of Edinburgh visits BRLSI

25 Years Of Impact For Youth Charity

Bath-based youth charity Mentoring Plus marked its 25th anniversary recently with a rallying call for more adult volunteer mentors and community fundraising.

The charity, which supports around 180 children and young people every week with mentoring, activities and youth clubs, welcomed over 80 supporters, partners, volunteers and young people to its Riverside Youth Hub HQ for the celebration. The event included the premiere of a short film, Shoulder to Shoulder, made by young people in collaboration with the egg, Theatre Royal Bath. Mentees talked about how it feels to have a trusted adult stand shoulder to shoulder with them, and collaborated on creative stop-motion animations to express the impact of mentoring.

“When I’m shoulder to shoulder with my mentor I feel happy and relieved of stress,” says one young mentee in the film. “It’s just like she’s my best friend.” Another mentee adds: “I feel like I have someone I can trust who can help me achieve my goals.”

Adults wanting to find out about volunteering and fundraising can visit mentoringplus.net/getinvolved or call Mentoring Plus on 01225 429694.

Artistic swimming award

University of Bath sporting scholar Kate Shortman secured Great Britain’s firstever Artistic Swimming World Championship medal with a historymaking performance in Fukuoka, Japan.

The Bill Whiteley Scholar won bronze in the Women’s Solo Free competition with a superbly executed routine which earned her 219.9542 points, only beaten by home favourite Yukiko Inui and Austria’s Vasiliki Alexandri.

Shortman, who studies International Management and Modern Languages (French), told British Swimming: “I can’t even put it into words, I am so excited. This is just a crazy step in the right direction for Great Britain, hopefully putting us on the map a bit more.”

It is a second international medal of the season for Shortman, who won Women’s Duet bronze with Izzy Thorpe at June’s European Games, and comes as the British squad – who train in Bristol – make a successful transition to a new scoring system designed to be less subjective. bath.ac.uk

The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution has hosted its first royal visit in 199 years. His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh, visited the Institution after a University of Bath graduation ceremony at Bath Abbey. He was met by Professor Ian Gadd, the current Chair of the Board. Along the way he learned about BRLSI’s history, activities, and ambitions as well as its plans for its bicentenary next year.

BRLSI is an educational charity founded by Georgian scientists, naturalists, and intellectuals in 1824. It holds over 120 talks each year, covering science, literature, the arts, and world affairs, and hosts exhibitions, drawing on its extensive palaeontological, geological, and ethnographic collections. Royal patronage was conferred on the Institution by King William IV in the 1830s and continued under Queen Victoria but this is the first formal visit by a member of the Royal Family since its foundation.

The Duke was treated to a tour of the BRLSI exhibition Riches of the Earth. The Duke then took a tour of the BRLSI vaults where he saw many things including antiquities from the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 and an ostrich feather from the Duke of Monmouth’s plume. There followed tea and cake where the Duke talked to volunteers and past and current members of the Board of Directors. The Duke heard more about the exciting plans for the Institution’s future, including a series of activities and events to mark its bicentenary. brlsi.org

Face to face at work

In the current exhibition at the Museum of Bath at Work – Face to Face: Victorian and Edwardian Portraits of Working People in Bath –you can meet people ‘face to face’ from 130 years ago. The photographs were taken of people in Bath in the 1890s and 1900s in the studio of Tom Carlyle Leaman at number 7, The Corridor, off Union Street.

These amazing pictures give us a real window on the past, especially the clothes that were then in fashion, accessories, and the way people styled their hair. The photographs are glass plate negatives and have been digitised.

Many of the plates have a surname written on the back, and volunteers at the Museum spent a year researching some of them. In the exhibition you can meet Mr David Press who ran a confectioners and bakery in Broad Street; the girls of the Candy family whose parents were farmers at Bathampton; Mr Charles Moutrie the General Manager at Bath Racecourse; and Miss Daisy Fentiman who worked stitching corsets. The exhibition is in the Hudson Gallery and is included in the museum’s admission ticket (£10/£9/£5).

The Museum of Bath at Work, Julian Road, Bath BA1 2RH. bath-at-work.org.uk

People’s Choice Award

Prior Park Landscape Gardenhas been shortlisted for the ICE South West People's Choice Award 2023 with the public encouraged to get involved by voting for their favourite civil engineering scheme.

The scheme to restore key features at the National Trust’s 18thcentury Prior Park Landscape Garden included crucial civil engineering works to the Middle Dam, Lower Dam, the stilling pond, and the historic landscape grounds. Prior Park is one of 14 projects from the south west shortlisted by a panel of civil engineers to reflect outstanding engineering achievement, innovation, and ingenuity. Shortlisted schemes must show how they improve life for people, whether through growth and economic development, climate resilience and carbon reduction or enriching communities and delivering social value.

The public is in control of choosing the winner of the People’s Choice Award through a free online vote at ice.org.uk/sw/award closing at 5pm on Tuesday 29 August 2023.

Raising the roof

An orchestra of Young Carers from B&NES travelled to Westminster to perform music created with Bath Philharmonia to an audience of MPs, Peers and music industry professionals at the House of Commons. The performance was part of an event, organised at the invitation of Wera Hobhouse MP, to celebrate the work of Bath Philharmonia and the incredible impact of music-making on young carers. The event was attended by Shadow Minister for the Arts Barbara Keeley MP, Baroness BonhamCarter, and Liberal Democrat carers’ champions Wendy Chamberlain MP and Munira Wilson MP.

Bath Philharmonia is the only professional orchestra in the UK that delivers a yearround programme of creative musicmaking residencies for Young Carers. Since 2009, it has enabled over 1500 Young Carers from the south west and beyond to cocreate and perform their own music. bathphil.co.uk