CONTEXT 177 : SEPTEMBER 2023 3 expand, through mid-tier trusts with the potential for growth, to well established, larger trusts that are looking to make a larger impact in a particular community, place or wider area. The new heritage development trusts will receive a package of funding that includes threeyear revenue grants between £55-£70,000 a year. Included is guidance from consultants and mentors to develop their skills and knowledge alongside peerto-peer support to expand their network of contacts, with regular events to share expertise and experience. They will be eligible to apply for project viability grants and project development grants to help bring historic buildings back into use. Established trusts will be supported to grow a pipeline of projects and expand their portfolios. Additional support will be given to develop the skills of volunteers and established groups. The new programme is looking to support heritage development trusts to develop portfolios of historic buildings from which they can generate income. This ensures these important trusts become resilient and financially sustainable. Reconnecting Beckford’s tower Beckford’s Tower, currently on the Heritage at Risk Register, is to be restored by Bath Preservation Trust, with support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, Historic England and others. Emery Brothers is the contractor. Completed in 1827, Beckford’s Tower was intended to house the collections of books, furniture and art of writer and collector William Beckford (1760–1844). Having sold the gothic-revival Fonthill Abbey in 1822, Beckford relocated to Bath and began the construction of his tower on Lansdown Hill. Riding out from his townhouse in Lansdown Crescent every morning before breakfast, he enjoyed the quiet of the tower and the views from the belvedere at the top. The ‘Our Tower: reconnecting Beckford’s tower and landscape for all’ project will transform the museum, open up the landscape and provide a new learning programme. Beckford’s wealth was secured from his ownership of plantations and enslaved people. The project will enable better interpretation of Beckford’s story based on wider exploration of his connections with the transatlantic slave trade. Beckford’s Tower: looking up From The Seven Lamps of Architecture by John Ruskin (1849) The idea of self-denial for the sake of posterity, of practicing present economy for the sake of debtors yet unborn, of planting forests that our descendants may live under their shade, or of raising cities for future nations to inhabit, never, I suppose, efficiently takes place among publicly recognized motives of exertion. Yet these are not the less our duties; nor is our part fitly sustained upon the earth, unless the range of our intended and deliberate usefulness include, not only the companions but the successors of our pilgrimage. God has lent us the earth for our life; it is a great entail. It belongs as much to those who are to come after us, and whose names are already written in the book of creation, as to us; and we have no right, by anything that we do or neglect, to involve them in unnecessary penalties, or deprive them of benefits which it was in our power to bequeath. And this the more, because it is one of the appointed conditions of the labour of men that, in proportion to the time between the seed-sowing and the harvest, is the fulness of the fruit; and that generally, therefore, the farther off we place our aim, and the less we desire to be ourselves the witnesses of what we have laboured for, the more wide and rich will be the measure of our success.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=