Leeds Hosts Lottery Bicentennial Event with Culture Minister. Yorkshire leads the way with an innovative joint Heritage Lottery Fund and Arts Council England event in Chapeltown marking this year’s bicentenary.
David Lammy, Culture Minister, joins the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) and Arts Council England at the Leeds West Indian Community Centre in Chapeltown to launch their programme of events and projects to mark the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the Slave Trade.
This dynamic event, designed to bring together community groups and arts and heritage practitioners, will show-case projects supported by HLF and Arts Council England, Yorkshire and provide a unique forum for funding advice.
Delivering the key note speech, David Lammy welcomed both HLF and the Arts Council’s enabling role as funders for bicentenary projects:
“I’m delighted to be in Chapeltown today and am looking forward to meeting many of the Yorkshire-based community groups who have benefited from either Heritage Lottery Fund or Arts Council England support. The range of bicentenary projects and events taking place in the region is both imaginative and inspirational and demonstrate how much people are thinking about 1807 and how it relates to their own lives today.
“The programme features dramatic and musical illustrations of the impact of the slave trade, including a performance by the Harewood House Trust project who will be performing Carnival Messiah at Harewood, a unique interpretation of Handel’s Messiah performed Caribbean carnival style and featuring gospel, reggae and hip-hop music. The focus of the day will be to forge new relationships as a model for working together in the future.”
Dr Fiona Spiers, HLF Regional Manager for Yorkshire and the Humber, added:
“We’re pleased to be supporting such a range of exciting and innovative projects to mark this momentous bicentenary. It is a chance for all of us to increase our understanding of the heritage we share, and the arts are an important way of animating it and making it relevant to people today. As part of our on-going commitment to diversity, we are keen to support, through grants for the arts, the many artists, producers and organisations from all cultural backgrounds who will want to mark this significant historic occasion.”
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