Michelham Priory is bidding to bag a massive cash boost from the Tesco Bags of Help initiative.

Tesco teamed up with Groundwork to launch its community funding scheme, which sees grants of £4,000, £2,000 and £1,000 – raised from carrier bag sales in Tesco stores – being awarded to local community projects.

Three groups in every Tesco region have been shortlisted to receive the cash award and shoppers are being invited to head along to Tesco stores to vote for who they think should take away the top grant.

MICHELHAM PRIORY is one of the groups on the shortlist.

The Priory needs your help raising funds to host groups from the community to come and get involved in garden volunteering. Money raised will also go towards maintaining this historic thirteenth century site, which is both a Scheduled Ancient Monument and a Site of Nature Conservation Interest! The Priory is one of six historic sites owned by charitable organisation Sussex Past.

“Make History today by voting for Michelham Priory House and Gardens! With your help, Michelham Priory can continue to provide great resources for local gardening volunteers. Maintaining the Priory buildings is a continuous project and with your support the Priory will be welcoming visitors for future generations.”

Voting is open in all Tesco stores throughout September and October. Customers will cast their vote using a token given to them at the check-out in store each time they shop.

Tesco’s Bags of Help project has already delivered over £33 million to more than 6,400 projects up and down the UK. Tesco customers get the chance to vote for three different groups every time they shop. Every other month, when votes are collected, three groups in each of Tesco’s regions will be awarded funding.

Alec Brown, Head of Community at Tesco, said: “We are absolutely delighted to open the voting for September and October. There are some fantastic projects on the shortlists and we can’t wait to see these come to life in hundreds of communities.”

Groundwork’s National Chief Executive, Graham Duxbury, said: “We’ve been thrilled to see the diversity of projects that have applied for funding, ranging from outdoor classrooms, sports facilities, community gardens, play areas and everything in between. “We’re looking forward to learning the results of the customer vote and then supporting each group to bring their project to life.”

Funding is available to community groups and charities looking to fund local projects that bring benefits to communities. Anyone can nominate a project and organisations can apply online. To find out more visit www.tesco.com/bagsofhelp

NOTES TO EDITORS:

• The Bags of Help initiative is supported by money raised from carrier bag sales in Tesco stores.
• So far Bags of Help has awarded £33 million to more than 6,400 community projects.
• For more information please visit: tesco.com/bagsofhelp

This year Fishbourne Roman Palace has been fortunate to be part of an innovative project, called ‘Building Roman Britain’. The project trials new archaeological scientific techniques to explore Roman building methods and the composition and production of ‘new materials’.

The project was initiated by The Department of Archaeology, Anthropology and Forensic Science at Bournemouth University and involved an exchange of data with both Fishbourne Roman Palace Museum near Chichester and The Roman Baths in the City of Bath. To showcase this project, Bournemouth University have produced an exciting short film.

Project Director, Prof Mark Brisbane, said “When the Romans arrived in Britain in the first century AD they brought with them a new form of architecture that used squared stone blocks and materials made of fired clay such as bricks and tiles. This would have been a completely new form of construction to most of the local inhabitants whose main building materials were wood, thatch and daub”.

The project aimed to characterise stone and ceramic building materials (bricks and tiles) by using a relatively new type of instrument known as portable X-ray Florescence (or pXRF for short). This allows archaeologists to chemically ‘fingerprint’ archaeological examples of these materials, in order to learn more about where the stone was quarried and where the ceramic building material was produced.

Another key aim of the project was to impart this exciting new process of scientific discovery to the general public, reaching a wider audience. The 12 minute long film has been produced by the team at IMMIX Media Ltd and explores the project’s development, results, their implications and the style of questions designed to put the handheld pXRF to the test.

The work was largely funded by HEIF (Higher Education Innovation Fund), part of HEFCE (the Higher Education Funding Council for England) and will be the subject of on-going collaborations between the university and its partner museums.

The project’s film can be watched via this link below:
https://research.bournemouth.ac.uk/2017/08/building-roman-britain-the-movie/

For further information on the Building Roman Britain Research Project see: https://research.bournemouth.ac.uk/project/building-roman-britain/

The work has subsequently helped underpin a successful bid by The Roman Baths to the Heritage Lottery Fund for a major redisplay and interpretation centre known as the Archway Project: https://www.romanbaths.co.uk/archway-project