Festival to celebrate Charles Darwin
Shrewsbury will be celebrating its famous son’s birthday next month, with a schedule of fun and interactive events taking place across the town.
From brain teasing lectures to dance workshops, the 2018 DarwIN Shrewsbury Festival will take place from February 8-24.
The festival will kick off with the finals of the very first Shropshire Young Thinkers’ Competition. The evening will see the finalists in the 7-11 and 12-17 age ranges present their ‘One Great Idea to Change the World’ to a panel of judges, including celebrity judge, children’s author, Isabel Thomas.
The two-and-a-half-week Festival programme will have a diverse range of specialist talks, including a memorial lecture by Professor Martin Rudwick. An evolution of dance talk and workshop will take place at the Hive and free guided tours of Darwin’s childhood will be held throughout the festival.
The festival also provides plenty of opportunities to entertain the children during half term, with workshops from the Shrewsbury Museum and The Wildlife Trust allowing children to go Wild about Dinosaurs and even make their own ceramic fossil tiles at the Darwin Rocks event.
Those more energetic can join in a Darwin-themed Park Run on 10th February, and those wishing to meet the man himself, can do so in the Square on the weekends of February 10-11 and 17-18.
For a truly engaging experience, an interactive Café Concert will also be taking place at the museum’s Stop Café, featuring the music of Bach, Bartok and Beethoven from world class musicians Zöe Beyers and Peter Adams.
Aleks Vladimirov, partnerships manager of Shrewsbury BID said: “We are so excited about the upcoming programme of events. The DarwIN Shrewsbury Festival is set to be a real celebration of our town as the origin of independent thinking. It is a chance for the community to remember and celebrate a man whose ground-breaking ideas influenced world thinking.”
The annual celebrations have been built on and invigorated with the help of a new-look organising committee with representatives from many organisations and support from Shrewsbury Business Improvement District (BID).
The Festival events, many of which are free, are already proving popular so the public is being urged to book in advance. For more information and ticket details for the DarwIN Shrewsbury Festival events visit originalshrewsbury.co.uk/Darwin
