THE community-run Richard Jefferies Museum is celebrating after Arts Council England agreed to support a £100,000, 18 month programme of arts and heritage activities for local people.

The project, including two poetry festivals for the town, will start this summer and aims to reach under fives, young people in and out of school, families, adults, and elders.

The project, called Arts@Jefferies, will produce what the organisers hope will be an engaging 18 month arts programme at the museum that not only connects new and existing audiences to the museum collections and life of Richard Jefferies, but also introduces many people to the broader arts through innovative and relevant ways.

Arts Council England has offered £55,000 to get the project going.

Working with another local organisation, Poetry Swindon, the project will also help the museum to provide a permanent home to poetry development in Swindon, and it is hoped this will help to extend this throughout the community, forging important relationships and helping culture make Swindon a great place to live.

Hilda Sheehan, who organises most of the museum’s events as well as being a poet and mainstay of the Swindon Poetry Festival, said: “This is such good news for us. We are a tiny museum and really want to reach as many people as possible, from all walks of life. Having a grant from the Arts Council means we can bring in really good artists and internationally renowned poets, and not have to charge the earth for people to enjoy them.”

Many of the people who volunteer at the museum are practising artists, with musicians, poets, painters, sculptors and photographers among the team.

Museum manager Mike Pringle, who is author of books such as Swindon in the Great War and the man behind the Mini installation on Alexander House at the bottom of the town centre, said: “We have only been developing the museum for a relatively short while, after taking it over from the council, and this helps us to go even further, developing local arts and heritage through our relationships with local services such as the Alzheimer’s Society, the Downs Syndrome Society, Mind, local schools, community groups/centres, libraries and galleries. We think that arts which respond to this sort of audience participation grow in new and unexpected ways, and bring our museum to life.”

The museum also has four Arts Awards Advisers, recognised by Arts Council, and as part of the new project will manage a programme of Arts Awards in local schools plus give specific help to one neighbouring school in order for it to gain its own Artsmark.