Brunel 200 Newsletter
Issue 1 Winter 2006
logos of Brunel 200, First Great Western, Discovery Channel
Brunel 200
When a few people began to discuss, four years ago, the possibility of having a major celebration of the life and work of Isambard Kingdom Brunel in 2006, his bicentennial year, I doubt that any of them would have been able to predict what would result.
This newsletter tells you about some of the many projects that are planned. With a launch in April, major exhibitions in At-Bristol, ss Great Britain and Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery, education projects that aim to reach every Bristol child, a graphic biography of Brunel’s life that will have a first print run of 100,000copies, and activities extending to the whole of the South West, 2006 will be a year to remember. On top of this will be the first ever South West Great Reading Adventure, Around the World in Eighty Days.
Brunel 200 for us is a celebration of a man, his work and the achievements of the past, as well as being about the future of Bristol and the South West. The inspiration that Brunel offers will help us create the new Brunels. That is why we are launching our own call for 200 Ideas for Bristol as part of Brunel 200. Let us have your views on how Bristol should develop – from the small scheme to the large, from the fun to the serious.
2006 is going to be a wonderful year. We’ve all been inspired by the vision and work of Brunel and his contemporaries. Book the dates in your diary now and look out for updates as we move towards the launch.
Leslie Perrin
Chair, Brunel 200
Brunel 200 Birthday Weekend Launch in Bristol
Brunel 200 starts in Bristol on 8 April 2006 with an open air party featuring music, dance, processions, and, as the stunning highlight, the switching on of the new lights at the Clifton Suspension Bridge followed by the best firework display the city has ever seen. The new illuminations, designed by international architectural lighting specialists Pinniger & Partners, will wash the full structure of the bridge with gentle light so the details of the chains, lattice work, towers and abutments will be visible in the dark.
The arts programme will include a new piece of music inspired by the bridge written by Bristol-based jazz musician Andy Sheppard which Andy will perform with 200 saxophonists. They are joined by Bristol Brass Band, Bristol Choral Society, and an extract from the community play being developed by acta celebrating the life and achievements of Brunel which will be performed later in April at the Bristol Industrial Museum. Among the participants will be Misfits Theatre Company and 100 children from four local primary schools.
A special supplement will be printed by the Bristol Evening Post giving details of the birthday weekend programme with suggestions for the best viewing points for seeing the bridge lights and the firework display. A fabulous start to the Brunel 200celebrations is guaranteed.
Brunel 200 Education
Education is at the heart of Brunel 200
A wide range of learning opportunities and resources will encourage people to find out about and be inspired by Brunel. In the Brunel spirit, the Brunel 200education programme aims to allow local people and visitors of all ages and levels of interest to think, create, be empowered, be stimulated, be provocative and make connections. The programme will provide formal, informal, supervised, self-directed and serendipitous experiences taking place in a variety of locations – centres of learning, libraries, community centres, tourist attractions, heritage sites, exhibition and performance venues, the home and the street.
Education plans for schools and colleges in Bristol include engineers in residence, creative workshops, resource packs, teacher networking and training days, subsidised transport to visit exhibitions, participation in arts projects, and much more.
Brunel’s Kingdom: Tyning Hengrove Junior School
Tyning Hengrove Junior School in Bristol will be celebrating the work of Brunel and his creative contemporaries in a Victorian-themed project running throughout 2006. The project is full of activities that aim to expand pupils’ knowledge and appreciation of the area in which they live and the school in which they study.
Among the highlights of the packed programme are: creating a Great Exhibition; going on a trip to the pantomime; joining the South West Great Reading Adventure; holding a Christmas fete; performing a music hall show and re-enacting the dinner held for the launch for the ss Great Britain in 1843.The school also contributed to Bristol’s Electric December, an annual on-line festival calendar offering 24 days of digital delights. The calendar showcased creativity and innovation from local groups, businesses, artists and learning organisations.
Paula Shears, the school’s humanities coordinator, made a successful application to the Brunel 200 arts projects fund for support of Brunel’s Kingdom and has made an invaluable contribution to the development of ideas and resources within the Brunel 200 education group. She said:
The link between a wide range of the curriculum and a famous local personality has presented us with a marvellous opportunity to link our children with their locality. Being able to see examples of Brunel’s work first hand will hopefully inspire children to consider their own creativity.
University of Bristol’s Clifton Crossing Competition
On 12 January 2006, the University of Bristol and New Civil Engineer – the journal of the Institution of Civil Engineers – announced a new design competition derived from the original 1830 brief for the Clifton Suspension Bridge that crosses the Avon Gorge. The competition challenges engineers, students and school pupils of all ages to draw up innovative bridge designs using modern technologies, materials and practices. Outline schemes must be submitted on a single A1 poster. The judges will then select up to six finalists who will be given a budget to work up their plans ahead of a public presentation in Bristol in mid-July2006. The competition entries will form the basis of a future engineering awareness programme for schools and a holiday activity programme. Further details and competition brief available on the Brunel 200 website from January 2006.
The competition is supported by: University of Bristol, New Civil Engineer, At-Bristol, Shape the Future/ Young Engineers, The Royal Academy of Engineering
Brunel 200 Arts Projects in Bristol
Nearly 30 new arts projects are being supported as part of Brunel 200,ranging from a play about Brunel to be performed in schools, through to a drama project involving black elders talking about the meaning of Brunel’s work for them. There will be workshops, music, a mural, a book, exhibitions, talks, film, poetry, dance pieces, installations, short stories, a radio adventure series, sculpture and even a commemorative drinks-can.
Ashlee Taylor, a student at Colston’s Girls’ School, was the youngest applicant to the arts project fund. Brunel Exposed will be an exhibition of photographs of Brunel’s Bristol sites accompanied by introductory workshops for young people on pinhole and digital photography. On hearing of her success, Ashlee said: ‘I was grateful and appreciative that the panel has recognised how passionate I am about photography and Brunel.’
Bristol Old Vic made a successful application for support of a new adaptation of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days linked to the South West Great Reading Adventure that will be aimed at young and family audiences. Simon Reade, artistic director of the Bristol Old Vic, said: ‘Just as Jules Verne found Brunel an inspiration for his novels, we will in our production seek to match the vision, creativity and ambition of the man himself.’
Nick Hand’s project – Brunel Limited – is an exhibition of interviews and photographs of company directors and workers from businesses that have taken the name of Brunel. One of the people included in the project is Joe Allen, proprietor of Brunel Bodycraft. In an interview with Nick, Joe said: ‘... every day I go to work and a bit of me aspires to be like the great man himself.’
Our Stories Make Waves is a project involving, among others, the sculptor Valda Jackson and writer Ruth Pitter. It will include research, writing workshops, tours, seminars and performances looking at the impact of Brunel on communities today. A spokesperson said: As a dynamic group of artists working in various media we will use original voices and creative work to engage new audiences in stimulating interactive discussion and debate, influenced by Brunel and his work in Bristol.
Bob Walton’s Triangulation is a site-specific educational and artists’ celebration of three of Brunel’s lesser-known achievements in Bristol and will include a multimedia, free public event taking place on the Brunel birthday weekend. Bob said:
I’ve had a few sessions in the Brunel Archive and am becoming increasingly amazed by Brunel’s achievements: how he managed to deal with such tiny details of design/construction and create such grand visions while enjoying a strong family and social life and putting his life in danger and writing wonderful letters and diaries, I just cannot imagine. Amazing man.
The illustration at the top of the page is of Brunel’s tubular swing bridge, which was moved to this position in 1873 and remained here until the construction of the Cumberland Basin Flyover in the 1960s. This will feature in Triangulation.
Brunel Exhibitions in Bristol
Bristol will be hosting a number of exhibitions during 2006 including major shows at ss Great Britain, At-Bristol and Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery.
ss Great Britain’s exhibition in the Maritime Heritage Centre, The Nine Lives of I K Brunel, will have nine zones, each describing a significant moment or crisis in Brunel’s personal and professional life, beginning and ending at the point when he suffered a fatal stroke on board his ship the Great Eastern. The displays will include original artefacts associated with the engineer and his projects, extracts from personal observations by himself and his contemporaries, and small-scale interactive exhibits. Among the larger objects featured will be a section from the Great Eastern’s funnel, the propeller of The Rattler, used by Brunel to test propeller-driven sea travel, and a full-scale replica of the broad-gauge locomotive, the Iron Duke.
At-Bristol’s exhibition, The Forces that made I K Brunel, will recreate a sense of the dangers and challenges that Brunel faced in his ambitious projects, graphically illustrating the forces he harnessed through a series of large-scale interactive exhibits. There will be five distinct zones, each focusing on a different engineering challenge: Go Deeper!, Go Higher!, Go Further!, Go Faster! and Go Forward! The twinned ss Great Britain and At-Bristol exhibitions will run from April to October 2006.
At Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery from 15 April to18 June there will be an exhibition of nationally important artworks highlighting the creative links between art, science and industry. Brunel and the Art of Invention will draw artistic parallels to the topics examined in the ss Great Britain and At-Bristol exhibitions and will also link with an exhibition of contemporary artists’ responses to Brunel to be held at the Royal West of England Academy in association with the University of the West of England. The four main thematic areas will be Great Britons, Work and Society, Travel and Empire, and Brunel: artistic engineer. Artworks will include William Powell Frith’s magnificent large-scale canvas The Railway Station showing travelers embarking on the Great Western Railway from Paddington.
Brunel 200 Publications
As part of the Brunel 200 celebrations, there will be a range of attractive and informative new publications produced, including exhibition catalogues and trail guides.
The historian Kenneth Clark wrote that Brunel ‘remained all his life in love with the impossible’. Brunel: in love with the impossible is a collection of specially commissioned essays on the life, work and world of Brunel. The364-page book will contain over 450 illustrations, many rarely seen before. The essays include Angus Buchanan’s overview of Brunel’s life, Andrew Nahum’s assessment of the achievements of Marc Brunel and Christine MacLeod’s exploration of the reasons for the engineering professions’ rise to prominence in mid nineteenth-century Britain. There are individual chapters on the Clifton Suspension Bridge, Bristol Docks, Great Western Railway and ss Great Britain, an insight into the Brunel archive at the University of Bristol, and a section looking at the wider context of his work. The book ends with a discussion of Brunel’s legacy, using examples from modern-day engineering challenges. A copy will be donated to all schools and colleges in Bristol, and to local libraries. It will also be for sale at exhibition sites and in bookshops from April 2006.
Brunel 200 has commissioned an entertaining graphic biography of Brunel written by Eugene Byrne with illustrations by Simon Gurr. Aimed at readers aged 11 and over, the 96-page comic will tell the story of Brunel and the world in which he worked as well as demonstrate clearly and simply the engineering techniques and scientific principles underlying his creations. 100,000 copies will be printed, most given away free through schools, colleges and libraries. An extract from the comic appears overleaf showing Brunel's injury in the Thames Tunnel and his arrival in Bristol where he hears about the plans to build a new bridge.
200 Ideas for Bristol
Brunel was a man of ideas – about transport, communications, movement. He saw – and was able to grasp – the great opportunities of the industrial revolution. He brought together arts and sciences in a way never seen before, creating projects that were functional and beautiful. Brunel built the modern world.
Brunel 200 is both about a man and the past and the future of Bristol and the South West. We want the spirit of Brunel to help create new ideas for the future of Bristol.
Bristol has been transformed in recent years with the regeneration of Harbourside and the city centre, At-Bristol, the renewal of Arnolfini, the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Queen Square and much more. What would Brunel be working on now? We want Brunel 200 to encourage new thinking and new ideas. These could be big or small, serious or fun. They might involve new festivals, public sculptures, bridges, an elected Mayor, new forms of public transport, new ways of working. They might involve the complete wiring of Bristol, to build a digital city and the application of new technology to al aspects of current life. They might help solve some of the environmental problems we face.
We want 200 ideas for Brunel 200.There will be an exhibition in May at the Architecture Centre.
If you have an idea, please let us have between 250-400 words about it.
Watch out for the special leaflets and posters, or send your idea to or to the address at the back of the newsletter. Please remember to provide full contact details.
The South West Great Reading Adventure
2006 starts with the biggest mass reading project in the UK: the Great Reading Adventure. Everyone in the South West is being encouraged to read Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, the classic tale of the phlegmatic Englishman, Phileas Fogg, and his hot-blooded French servant, Passepartout, endeavouring to travel around the world in just 80 days to win a £20,000 bet. This 80-day project follows on the success of Bristol’s annual city-wide Great Reading Adventure which has been running since 2003.
Around the World in Eighty Days was Verne’s most popular book. Contemporary readers shared Verne’s fascination with travel and transportation, and the possibility that a once unimaginable trip around the world was now within their grasp. Modern readers can still share that excitement as they are carried breathlessly through the book’s fast turning pages. It is an apt choice for 2006 as Verne travelled from Liverpool to New York on Brunel’s Great Eastern and admired the engineer’s work.
Since 5 January 2006 thousands of copies of Around the World in Eighty Days published in the acclaimed Oxford World’s Classics’ series have been available for loan from libraries across the region. A specially adapted version for younger readers is also available. Free copies of both books along with the accompanying illustrated readers’ guide are available from the Blackwell bookshop on Park Street, Bristol, Secession Books in Bath and Swindon Advertiser (all offers valid only while stocks last). Copies have also been given to patients in Bristol Royal Infirmary, and to schools and colleges.
Aardman Animations has created a special Wallace and Gromit image to be used on publicity material and on the cover of the book. University of the West of England graduate James de la Rue has been commissioned to illustrate the children’s adaptation. His illustrations have been used by the Bath Chronicle, Bristol Evening Post, Swindon Advertiser and other newspapers across the region who have serialised this version.