The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution project receives Heritage Fund Grant

The Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution (BRLSI), a cultural hub and museum in the heart of Bath, has been awarded £225,000 from The National Lottery Heritage Fund.

This grant empowers BRLSI to diversify audiences, to broaden its mission of advancing and promoting science, literature, and the arts, and to strengthen its foundations for the future. BRLSI are in 2024 celebrating their Bicentenary, and an intrinsic part of the celebrations will be to encourage as diverse an audience as possible to participate in their range of cultural activities.

Thanks to National Lottery players, the Heritage Fund grant will enable BRLSI to offer a range of creative and family-friendly events that makes our unique heritage and collections available to the community for perhaps the first time.These family-targeted activities will include the upcoming ‘Brilliantly Engineered’ event featuring exhibits and workshops aimed at school age children, and the relaunch in the Autumn of their very popular ‘Bath Taps into Science’ festival.

Perhaps, most crucially of all, the grant will facilitate the recruitment of an education officer, who will design and develop an imaginative programme of activities for young people designed to inspire their creativity and enthuse their young imaginations through BRLSI’s extensive historical and ethnological collections.

The project will support BRLSI through new sustainable workplace systems designed to expand their volunteer pool, increase their digital activities (encouraging broader participation so access to its impressive Georgian building is not always needed) and develop electronic systems which help them to increase the donations and legacies that will be a vital part of securing their future. Not only that, the grant will enable them to provide new user-friendly audience management systems, making them more customer-focused and aligned with an offering match-fit for the 21^st century.

Ian Gadd, BRLSI Chair of Directors said, "We are delighted to receive this transformative grant from the Heritage Fund. It will make our ambitious programme of talks, exhibitions, and other activities over the coming year even more exciting, innovative and inclusive, and will help us become a stronger and more sustainable organisation. It is also very welcome recognition, in our Bicentenary year, of our importance for Bath’s cultural and educational life.”