Calling all heritage & cultural attractions

The BBC has launched a new History Campaign for the summer holiday and needs help from cultural and heritage businesses to get as many children and families involved as possible.

History is a major theme for the BBC this year and many programmes will be shown on TV as a result. To compliment the programmes the BBC wants to work with local businesses to help inspire families across the UK get ‘hands on’ with their past to help them discover history in their local area. As a result they want to provide businesses with Holiday History Packs bursting with ideas that will inspire heritage and cultural attractions to run family activities. In return any activities provided will feature on their website.

For more information email helen.sykes@bbc.co.uk.

Lincoln Book Festival – become a friend & attract visitors

Events act as a hook for attracting visitors and we need your help to promote the Lincoln Book Festival on 12th – 16th May. The programme has just been launched and can be viewed on the Book Festival’s Website from 25 March onwards.

If you want to support the festival please contact Sara Bullimore (sara.bullimore@googlemail.com). You can become a ‘Friend of the Festival’ by paying a small subscription fee, this will give you priority access to the headline events; or you can just request festival brochures, posters and other promotional material to display in your business.

Useful links
- Follow the festival on Twitter! /lincolnbookfest
- Become a Book Festival Fan on Facebook
- For the box office call (01522) 873894 or http://www.lincolndrillhall.com/

Did you know Lincolnshire has Robin Hood connection?

It’s not long now until the release of the new Robin Hood movie starring Russell Crowe (sorry, but I can’t get the vision of Robin Hood, Men in tights out my head).

In anticipation on this, (the movie, not Russell in tights) we have been researching any connections Robin Hood had to Lincolnshire.

We’re doing this because when the movie is launched it will get global promotion and Lincolnshire could get a little slice of the cake– like we did for The Da Vinci Code and The Young Victoria.

Although none of the movie was filmed in Lincolnshire, people following the Robin Hood Movie Trail or story of the man himself will want to visit places that have connections to him…. and Lincolnshire is one of them!

Work is been done by us, VisitEngland and Experience Nottinghamshire to develop movie trail maps. But in the meantime have a little read of these….

• To get a sense of how big Sherwood Forest really was go on a Lincoln Cathedral roof top tour and see the boundaries where the forest use to border Lincolnshire. Sherwood Forest came within 6 miles of the Cathedral!


• Lincoln Castle is the only place in the world where you can see the Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forrest together.


• The material that his clothes were made of was from Lincolnshire, it was called “Lincoln Green”.


• The library in the Cathedral has one of the very first hand written rhymes of Robin Hood. Dr Nicholas Bennett resident at the cathedral said “Lincoln Cathedral’s Library is of major importance in Robin Hood studies. It has the first hand written rhyme / verse which refers to Robin Hood.
  The verse reads (In modernised form), ‘Robin Hood in Sherwood stood, hooded and hated, hosèd and shod’. This is the earliest surviving written rhyme of Robin Hood in existence anywhere. We display this in the Library exhibition every year.” See the copy on a visit to Lincolnshire.


• Robin Hood was known as ‘robbing the rich to feed the poor’ and it would have been Lincoln’s ‘rich’ he robbed at city events as it was the closest most affluent city to him.


• The Sheriff (or Shire Reive) of Nottingham administered Lincolnshire as part of his area of jurisdiction.