Darwin Festival 2022 - a successful week celebrating Shrewsbury's most famous son

We have been delighted to work with a wide range of partners in and around the town in order to help put on another wonderful Darwin Festival this year, culminating in Charles’ birthday toast on the 12^th February to mark his 213th birthday.

We started the festival in fine style with a charity music concert at St Alkmund’s Church.  Talented musical Salopians performed an evening of chamber music and song to an attentive audience. 

During the week of the Festival we made available a number of bespoke Darwin-related videos for use in primary and secondary schools, accompanied by resources created by Oak Meadow Primary School, which were also offered to a wider audience of enthusiasts.

This collection included wonderfully informative and lively guided tour of the town’s Darwin landmarks given by Jon King (original founder of the DarwIN Festival) and work done in collaboration with English Heritage to showcase Down House and its garden, focusing on Darwin the thinker and the family man as he worked towards publishing ‘On The Origin of Species’. 

Closer to home, we were proud to talk about Darwin whilst a student at Shrewsbury School and the Headmaster spoke about his enduring relevance and legacy as an inspiration to us all.  We hosted a lecture at School given by Dr Jeremy Pritchard of the University of Birmingham, talking about the historical development of the idea of evolution and the importance of the West Midlands in that story.  Later, via Zoom, we hosted a webinar with Professor Chris Thomas, also of the University of Birmingham, about evolution and the spread of antimicrobial resistance genes.  Many of these talks and videos can still be accessed via the Festival archive.

For many in school, and for a number of Darwin-enthusiast visitors, the highlight was the chance to have a guided tour of the many Darwin treasures to be found in the Archive and Taylor Library.  It was a pleasure and privilege to see the artefacts and to have them brought to life by Dr Brooke-Smith and Naomi Nicholas.  The Shrewsbury Biscuit Podcast, a show designed to celebrate Shrewsbury, captured a sense of the buzz surrounding these guided visits.