City updates

Voices for life

Bath-based charity Voices for Life recently launched the brand new singing and wellbeing project ‘Extraordinary!’ during children’s mental health week. The six original songs are written by Bath’s Jools Scott and Sue Curtis, and celebrate children’s uniqueness.

During the project children from Bath schools, the Voices for Life Bath Children’s Choir and Bath Young Carers will participate in workshops to understand their individuality and potential to achieve great things, while learning the music to Extraordinary! The project culminates with a performance in Bath Abbey on 29–30 June, a show which is sure to be full of energy and excitement.

Tessa Armstrong, Voices for Life founder and executive director said “We were thrilled to launch Extraordinary! during children’s mental health week. The Voices for Life team are excited to be able to get back into Bath Schools to boost our children’s confidence through this musical adventure.”

Workshops will be taking place with nearly 300 children from St. Martin’s Garden School, Combe Down Primary School, St Michael’s Junior Church School, St Andrew’s Church of England Primary School, Oldfield Park Junior School, The Paragon School, and Bath Young Carers. They will be supported by Voices for Life’s own Bath Children’s Choir.

For further information contact tessa@voicesforlife.org.uk voicesforlife.org.uk

Live in Bath and eat pie

Pieminster, the independent, family business from Bristol, has arrived in Bath. Pieminister has been making pies in their west country kitchens for 20 years. Located on Westgate Street next door to Komedia, Pieminister Bath is right where you need it, to grab a bite before a gig, gather for pies and drinks (it’s 2-4-1 cocktails all day, every day) or take time over a long, leisurely pie feast with friends. Serving up the full range of award-winning pies, you’ll find old favourites like the Moo and the Free Ranger alongside newcomers like the plant-based Mooless Moo (Supreme Champion at 2022 British Pie Awards) and the Tikka to Ride, filled with rich, warming free range British chicken tikka, topped with an onion bhaji and finished with a zesty herb relish.

Pieminster is a certified B Corp, so when you visit you know that the food is of the highest quality, and made with sustainability and ethics at its core. And what’s more Pieminster has just published a book, Pieminister: Live and Eat Pie!, available for £22 from 2 March.

Pieminster is open Friday to Saturday from noon to 11pm, and from noon to 10pm from Monday to Thursday.

Pieminister Bath, 24 Westgate Street, Bath BA1 1EP; pieminister.co.uk

Musical enlightenment

An Enlightened Heart by Renaissance and Baroque music quartet Galliarda, to be performed at the Holburne on 30 March, highlights the music and performing traditions of women in the 18th century. The 18th century saw a gradual transformation in the status of women as performers and composers. While professional singers were well established in the 17th century, their appearance on the stage and in public meant that, like ‘actresses’, they tended to be seen as women with low morals.

Galliarda aims to raise awareness of the music of this period, and the difficult position women had as independent composers, multiinstrumentalists and singers in the Age of Enlightenment. The quartet features the young recorder player Kate Allsop who recently completed her graduate studies at the Birmingham Conservatoire. Kate is joined by the seasoned performers Sara Stowe (harpsichordist and singer), Ibi Azziz (viol) and Matthew Spring (lutes and viols). New pieces for early instruments have also been commissioned from young female composers for this event.

An Enlightened Heart, 30 March, 7.30–9pm, Holburne Museum, £20 holburne.org/events

New album from Young Martyrs

There’s a new album out this month from local band Young Martyrs, who got together in between the 2020 lockdowns to stay positive during tough times by doing something creative. Tom wrote some songs and the band (Tom Corneill, Rich Beeby and Lee Cole with guitars from friend and contributor Simon Whitehead) met in open air barns and large open rooms so that they could try turning those songs into something real. They didn’t realise at the time that things would come together quite so quickly and by December the band had recorded its first album.

With pandemic restrictions all gone in 2022, Young Martyrs approached their second album differently. They recorded the tracks live at Real World Studios with additional parts from other studios, most notably Indefra in Frome with the help of its owner Seb who co-produced both albums. “The album is called Time Is Not On Our Side, partly because we got a little too comfortable at Real World Studios and nearly ran out of time to finish the album!”, says Tom.

The full album Time Is Not On Our Side is available from 6 March for £8 and includes the band’s singles Let Me Know and Never Gave You The Blues. The new album and the band’s first album Young Martyrs can be purchased through the website: youngmartyrs.com

Notes On A Small City

Richard Wyatt

The Fashion Museum may be closed until the new building is fully funded and refurbished, but it’s still managing to keep its collection in the public eye. This includes loans to a new exhibition of Georgian dress at Buckingham Palace, says columnist Richard Wyatt

Bath’s Fashion Museum may be without a permanent home at the moment but that’s not stopping it from continuing to make its mark around the world.

To recap –in case you aren’t up to speed on developments –this important collection of almost 100,000 objects shut up shop in the city’s Assembly Rooms last October at the end of a long lease. Now, with a new home at the old central Post Office having been earmarked, B&NES needs £34 million to cover the cost of buying the building, providing permanent storage for the collection and creating another public display drawn from its incredibly large wardrobe.

In the meantime, the Council has had to find a secure and environmentally safe storage facility for everything, and that has meant, I understand, sending it all Warminster’s way.

However, as previously mentioned, that doesn’t mean everything is settling down for a long-drawn-out moth-ball-induced sleep.

Fashion Museum Manager Rosemary Harden told me that after successfully completing the temporary move her team faced a big problem: how to enable the public to interface with the collection, to continue to make it visible? With that in mind, they’ve developed a fantastic loans programme which will see items from the Bath collection on display at exhibitions across the world –and as far away as Switzerland and even India. Two of these loans will have royal connections with items going off to exhibitions at both Kensington and Buckingham Palaces.

The exhibition called Style and Society: Dressing the Georgians is at The Queen’s Gallery within Buckingham Palace, the King’s official London residence. Opening on 21 April this year it explores what the Georgians wore, ranging from clothing worn by laundry maids to the glittering gowns worn at court. And beneath a portrait of Queen Charlotte painted by Thomas Gainsborough (see image to the right) will be a fine example of Georgian court dress on loan from Bath’s Fashion Museum.

Rosemary told me that this was an example of getting our local collection and the museum into the public realm, and within museums big enough to print catalogues and even tour their own special exhibitions. “The big players have all come to us because of the treasures in our collection, which is one of the best in the world. It’s a great way of keeping our brand alive and making sure some of the exhibition glory reflects back on us.”

It’s not museum practice to charge for loans but Rosemary thinks it’s a good trade-off: “Our loans to exhibitions and museums are often conserved, photographed and catalogued at no cost to us.”

Apart from physical loans, the Fashion Museum team are focusing on digital access and have even started making little films for the YouTube channel. They are happy to receive any fashion enquiry via fashion_enquiries@bathnes.gov.uk. Rosemary told me the service is very popular with people researching their family history where identifying clothes can help date pictures.

While the curatorial team remain suitably busy, it’s up to the Head of Heritage Services at B&NES Rob Campbell to raise the cash to enable the museum to reopen as soon as possible. The Council recently missed out on a government ‘levelling up’ grant but he said preparing the case for financial support was an exercise that won’t be wasted and will help with future applications elsewhere. A Fashion Museum charity will be set up to support the project and help raise funds. There’s no doubt that with the already acknowledged support of local MPs and the Arts Council the authority will apply to the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Depending, of course, on achieving fundraising targets, Rob is hoping that the new Fashion Museum will open around 2027/28. They’ve got to finance the construction of a permanent home for the collection on councilowned land at Locksbrook too. There are also discussions about a long-term relationship with the nearby Bath Spa University arts campus.

Though Bath-centered, the new museum will seek to involve the whole of the district with pop-up displays in vacant units across B&NES and will be consulting with ratepayers on what sort of a place the new museum should be.

Rob told me, “All in all it’s a big investment in the cultural life of the people of B&NES. We already have our World Heritage inscriptions and, with our Roman Baths and Georgian architecture and social history, we are one of the world’s best cultural institutions. It’s all hugely exciting, and the aim is to generate income for the local economy and provide both education and worldwide engagement. It’s a case of go big or go home.”

And by the way the Postal Museum, which is still open in the Post Office building basement, will be staying to add to the culture in this Milsom St Quarter. n