News
DARWIN MEMORIAL & GEO GARDEN
Current proposed budget for delivery: £200K
2009 will mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin. The town of Shrewsbury, his birthplace is set to be the focus of worldwide celebrations and an ambitious public art project will form the centrepiece.
The River Severn snakes around the town centre and a small park on its bank has been chosen as the site for the Darwin Memorial and Geo Garden.
The scheme brings together two key strands, Darwin’s ideas and the unique mix of geology in Shropshire.
An epic, tectonic journey across the face of the earth has resulted in rock from ten of the twelve geological periods appearing in the Shropshire landscape. As Geology was Darwin’s first formal science, it seems fitting that these two strands are woven together to commemorate his life in the landscape that first inspired him.
Darwin was a resident of Shrewsbury for the first twenty-seven years of his life which included his university years and the voyage on The Beagle. In terms of his later work, Shropshire is ‘where the mind was made’. Shrewsbury’s Darwin is a young boy with an enquiring mind in contrast to the image of the hirsute elderly academic.
Darwin’s legacy is strongly based on ‘connectivity’; the links between ideas, links between places and links between ideas and places is central to the development of this project. The chosen site is where an ancient bridge once linked the town to the wider landscape and the river linked the town to communities along its banks and ultimately to the open sea and the wider world beyond.
The choice of a riverside location responds to an extract from The Origin of Species:
‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing in the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us’.
The vision is to develop the site into a landscaped area that can be used to stimulate understanding and learning for generations to come. It will require a design that will enable the site to be used as an ongoing resource for education and lifelong learning.
The project is not without its challenges as the River Severn regularly floods and encroaches on the site. The town has responded to this annual deluge in imaginative ways. Flood defences were built a few years ago and are visible across the water from the site. The town is also home to a number of environmental consultancies. More recently, a series of Sci Art symposia began by tackling the subject of Climate Change.
Regretably the plan to appoint three Science/Art partnerships to respond to the site from 2009 to 2011 has been shelved owing lack of external funding.
The project is led by the local Public Art Partnership. The group was formed from the private sector and town centre residents with support from the local authority, Shrewsbury & Atcham Borough Council and development funding has come the Arts Council.
Further information:
Darwin Bicentennial Memorial Geo Garden (PDF)
Darwin Bicentennial Memorial Garden: Feasibility Study (PDF)
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Darwin200 is being devleoped by a group of highly reputed national partners and aims to celebrate the work of Charles Darwin and his legacy during the period 2008-9.
Shrewsbury & Atcham Borough Council is a member and plans to contribute to the Darwin200 programme of activities through the Shrewsbury Darwin Festivalm the Darwin Summer Symposium and the Darwin Debate for Shropshire Schools.
In the meantime, work goes on to secure the Darwin family home at The Mount which will compliment a new heritage interpretation centre for Shropshire (replacing the existing Museum & Art Gallery at Rowley's House) to be located in the Music Hall once work is coompleted on the new Shrewsbury Theatre Severn, which is being built on the banks of the River Severn at Frankwell Quay.
An ambitious project to build a working replica of the Beagle as a floating classroom is being proposed for details click HERE
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