🧢 Park, fly, ride to the Heights of Abraham
Derbyshire’s oldest tourist attraction has spent the year marking the 50th anniversary of its current ownership, and 40 years of its iconic alpine-style cable cars which ferry visitors from ground level. It first opened its gates to paying visitors as a Pleasure Garden in 1787. These days, the cable car ticket gives visitors a “free right of way” over the hilltop park which two guided tours through illuminated caverns, exhibitions, magnificent views, adventure playgrounds and woodland trails. And later this year, the attraction will be shown of in an entirely new light. The Lights of Abraham will be a brand new experience for visitors from 22 November to 30 December.
🧢 Derby targets world class cultural experiences
A recently launched Derby Museums Business Network is now inviting businesses in the city to help make Derby a more vibrant and inspiring place to live, work, and visit. It will reflect the city’s past of enlightenment values, industrial innovation and creative spirit. At the launch, His Grace, the Duke of Devonshire shared his personal experience of how Derby’s museums promote wellbeing and bring people together, and in so doing instil strong sense of local pride and excellence.
🧢 New museum display for an ‘unsung hero’
An “unsung hero” of Stoke-on-Trent’s will be getting more of the recognition he deserves in November with the unveiling of a display about his life and work, at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery. At 17, John Grocott won the Guy’s Hospital Medical School War Memorial Scholarship open to candidates under the age of 21. That set him on a path which saw him return to the City of Stoke-on-Trent in 1933 as a House Surgeon at the North Staffordshire Royal Infirmary (NSRI). He learned his craft as a plastic surgeon from the country’s greatest: Sir Harold Gillies and Archibald McIndoe. At the outbreak of the war John, at the age of just 29, was singlehandedly left to run the NSRI Plastic Surgery Unit. Located within the Spitfire Gallery, the new display dedicated to John Grocott will be filled with items relating to his life and work in Stoke-on-Trent.
🧢 This week’s ‘Top Pick’ @WeightmanPR: Farley’s House and Gallery
Kate Winslet’s latest movie Lee hit the cinema screens last week - telling the incredible story of photographer Elizabeth ‘Lee' Miller, a fashion model who became an acclaimed war correspondent for Vogue magazine during World War II. Her former home - Farleys House is near Chiddingly in East Sussex - is now a museum, gallery and archive featuring the lives and work of its former residents, Lee Miller and the surrealist artist Roland Penrose. They lived at Farley Farm from 1949 and, in the thirty-five years they were there, built up a collection of contemporary art treasures. Imbued with a ‘sense of place’, it also holds temporary exhibitions, and has a shop and café.
