Latest news with #We'reGoingonaBearHunt
Wales Online
23-04-2025
- Wales Online
Brilliant zoo less than an hour from Cardiff that will be quieter this Easter holidays
Brilliant zoo less than an hour from Cardiff that will be quieter this Easter holidays The Bristol Zoo Project in the south west is a wildlife park that focuses on protecting threatened habitats on our doorsteps and around the globe, and it's a wonderful place to visit this Easter holidays Two young male wolves at The Wild Place Project in Bristol (Image: Getty Images ) While the iconic Bristol Zoo may be a thing of the past, there's still a fantastic place to visit across the Severn where you can see stunning animals and have a great time. The Bristol Zoo Project, previously known as The Wild Place Project, was launched by the Bristol Zoological Society in 2013. It's a wildlife park with a mission to protect threatened habitats both locally and globally. Work is set to begin at the BZP at Blackhorse Hill in Bristol to transform it into a new conservation zoo featuring immersive animal habitats. This zoo safeguards endangered habitats close to home, like British woodland, as well as those further afield in places like Madagascar, Cameroon, and the Congo. Article continues below It is worth the visit, especially during the Easter holiday and even more so this week as most pupils in England have now gone back to school and therefore the site will potentially be less busy than it has been over the last week and a bit quieter than Welsh attractions. At the Project, you'll encounter European brown bears in the Bear Wood, cohabiting with European grey wolves, Eurasian lynxes, and wolverines. You can also visit the Madagascan village, which houses mongoose lemurs, ring-tailed lemurs, white-belted ruffed lemurs, and our Alaotran gentle lemurs. A four-month-old Lynx kitten explores its home in the Bear Wood exhibit (Image: PA ) The Benoue National Park, a replica of the wilds of Cameroon, Africa, is home to giraffes, cheetahs and zebras. Last spring, Bristol Zoo Project welcomed a new addition - a male red panda named Nilo. Visitors can watch him acclimate to his custom-built habitat. During the spring and summer of 2024, a brand-new trail was introduced. The We're Going on a Bear Hunt trail brings the award-winning animation to life. Based on the beloved children's picture book, it features themed installations that invite visitors to follow the book's characters' journey, braving the elements and recreating the family's adventure at the story's core. We're Going on a Bear Hunt trail at the Bristol Zoo Project (Image: Bristol Zoo Project ) The trail's launch coincided with the fifth anniversary of the opening of Bristol Zoo Project's award-winning Bear Wood. Here, four European brown bears coexist with wolves, lynxes and wolverines. The exhibit narrates the history of British woodland from 8,000 BC to the present day. It meanders through 7.5 acres of ancient woodland on elevated treetop walkways. Visitors can step back in time and observe its inhabitants – all native British species lost over time, now reintroduced in one spectacular immersive experience. The giraffes at the Wild Place Project (Image: PA ) Aside from spotting wildlife, there's a plethora of activities to keep the whole family entertained. These include several outdoor play areas, a giant bird's nest, and the Barefoot Trail where children can experience different habitats under their feet. There's also a climbing wall and a giant maze - plenty to enjoy. The Bristol Zoo Project embarked on a new phase of redevelopment last spring, with the creation of a Central African Forest habitat. It became home to the zoo's existing troop of Critically Endangered western lowland gorillas, who were joined by Endangered cherry-crowned mangabeys, Critically Endangered slender-snouted crocodiles, Endangered African grey parrots and several extremely threatened species of West African freshwater fish. The site went through renovations last year (Image: Bristol Zoo Gardens ) For all the latest on the BZP and to book tickets, click here. The Bristol Zoological Society has plans for the site stretching to 2035. At the 136-acre Bristol Zoo Project site, they aim to create an immersive experience where visitors and animals are enveloped in the natural landscape. In the coming years, Bristol Zoological Society plans to transform into an inspiring visitor attraction where approximately 80% of species will be connected to our global conservation efforts, living in environments that closely mirror their natural habitats. The society's former site at Bristol Zoo Gardens in Clifton is set to be sold off to secure the future of the organisation. Article continues below
Yahoo
09-03-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Covid memorial event to be held at arboretum
The fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the UK is due to be remembered at the National Memorial Arboretum. Sunday's service including poetry, personal stories and music has been arranged by NHS Charities Together, a charitable organisation which supports the health service. Among those guests attending the invite-only event will be the children's author Michael Rosen, who spent 48 days in intensive care with Covid-19, and singers Lesley Garrett and Anthonia Edwards. The event at the site in Alrewas, Staffordshire, will take place on a national day of reflection and will also include a minute's silence. Mr Rosen, who is best known for We're Going on a Bear Hunt, has written a new poem reflecting on the impact of Covid and he is due to read it during the service. He said it was a time to reflect and that he was thinking of those who were in hospital with him who did not survive. "We owe it to them and their families to remember them," he said. Organisers said they also wanted to reflect on the sacrifices made by people in the health service and volunteers. There will be NHS staff, patients, and bereaved families attending, along with senior healthcare representatives and MPs. The service will feature some of their stories and there will be a reading of the poem Blessed Alder by Dan Simpson, the arboretum's former poet-in-residence. Ellie Orton OBE, chief executive of NHS Charities Together, said its research showed a fifth of people in the UK were still processing what happened to them during the pandemic. "With over half of the UK still grieving for someone they lost due to Covid-19, we know how much this moment to reflect is needed," she said. Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. Memorial arboretum marks significant year of 1944 Trees of Life glade to honour Covid-19 victims City to mark five years since start of pandemic Coronavirus: Your tributes to those who have died NHS Charities Together The National Memorial Arboretum
BBC News
09-03-2025
- Health
- BBC News
National Memorial Arboretum to host Covid remembrance event
The fifth anniversary of the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the UK is due to be remembered at the National Memorial service including poetry, personal stories and music has been arranged by NHS Charities Together, a charitable organisation which supports the health those guests attending the invite-only event will be the children's author Michael Rosen, who spent 48 days in intensive care with Covid-19, and singers Lesley Garrett and Anthonia event at the site in Alrewas, Staffordshire, will take place on a national day of reflection and will also include a minute's silence. Mr Rosen, who is best known for We're Going on a Bear Hunt, has written a new poem reflecting on the impact of Covid and he is due to read it during the said it was a time to reflect and that he was thinking of those who were in hospital with him who did not survive."We owe it to them and their families to remember them," he said. Organisers said they also wanted to reflect on the sacrifices made by people in the health service and will be NHS staff, patients, and bereaved families attending, along with senior healthcare representatives and service will feature some of their stories and there will be a reading of the poem Blessed Alder by Dan Simpson, the arboretum's former Orton OBE, chief executive of NHS Charities Together, said its research showed a fifth of people in the UK were still processing what happened to them during the pandemic."With over half of the UK still grieving for someone they lost due to Covid-19, we know how much this moment to reflect is needed," she said. Follow BBC Stoke & Staffordshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram.
Telegraph
05-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Helen Oxenbury: ‘Kids today don't have enough quiet time. They're exhausted'
Helen Oxenbury is in a quandary. Her first solo show after almost 60 years illustrating children's books opens in less than a month and she is having second thoughts about what should be on the walls. She wants the exhibition to focus on her latest drawings, which include illustrations for her first book with Michael Rosen since We're Going on a Bear Hunt (1989), but the organisers want the show to span her professional lifetime. 'I want to exhibit what I think is the better stuff I've done, which is not the early stuff, so we are having a bit of a ding dong,' she tells me over coffee. We are seated at a table in a sunny conservatory at the back of the Hampstead home she shared with her husband and fellow illustrator John Burningham, until his death in 2019. 'What do you think? Do you want to see some rather rubbishy early stuff?' asks Oxenbury, who is 86 and, I suspect, something of a perfectionist. Her reticence is at odds with her reputation as one of the most beloved children's illustrators of modern times, whose books have sold more than 35 million copies. But it hints at the perceived second class status held by many illustrators of her generation. Drawing for children was 'not frowned upon, but dismissed; it wasn't taken seriously,' she says. Have female illustrators been overlooked? 'I think female anything are always overlooked, aren't they? It doesn't have to be illustrators. Are we getting there? I'm not sure. About 20 years ago I thought so, I'm not so sure now,' she says. The exhibition, Illustrating the Land of Childhood, will be held at Burgh House, an arts institution and museum just five minutes walk from her house in Hampstead. It comes three years after one was held featuring some of Burningham's work. 'You'd think, though, that 50 years living in one place, they might have some sort of interest in John and I,' she adds. Some of Oxenbury's 'early stuff' includes experimental sketches for We're Going on a Bear Hunt (1989). Rosen had pictured the protagonists as kings and queens and princes but Oxenbury disagreed, swapping royal figures for ordinary children. Born in Ipswich in 1938, Oxenbury met Burningham in the late 1950s at London's Central School of Art and Design [now Central Saint Martins] where she was studying theatre design. She had a 'wonderful, free childhood', growing up on the coast, in Felixstowe. 'God, what my parents allowed me to do; it was unbelievable. Going out aged 10 without a life jacket in a little yacht with a chap who was only about two years older. They never worried.' Her drawings reflect that sense of adventure, most famously in Bear Hunt, where the children 'Stumble trip! Stumble trip!' their way through a dark forest inspired by the trees on Hampstead Heath. Growing up, her son would spend hours fishing at the ponds with random men, alone with the family dog. 'All those men were sweet with him, but imagine letting him do that now! It's a shame,' she says. 'Where's it going? They're now talking about putting a tracker on [children] like with a dog.' She laments that technology is rendering books obsolete, even for the very young, citing her own grandchildren as evidence. 'They do love books, but those screens take first place, probably. Somebody the other day had fixed a screen up on the roof of a pram for the baby. To keep it good,' adding: 'Nobody said it was easy bringing up kids, did they?' Three children put paid to her burgeoning career as a set designer, which had included three years working at Israel's national theatre, the Habima, in Tel Aviv. (Burningham had been working in Israel, for an animated film company, and had sent her a ticket to join him.) They got married in 1964, settling in Hampstead where Burningham had had student digs. 'We thought for years and years that we would probably move to the country and have lots of animals. That was 50 years ago,' says Oxenbury. In need of work she could do from home, her 'dear friend' Jan Pieńkowski, later known for his Meg & Mog illustrations, commissioned Oxenbury to design images for greeting cards. This prompted Pieńkowski to suggest she try doing a children's book, something Burningham was already producing to great acclaim. 'I thought, 'What a wonderful way to have a career! Doing work for children! Totally marvellous!' I did enjoy it. That's how it started,' she says, her inflections underscoring her joy at her unintentional life path. She started with a counting book, Numbers of Things (1967), and won the prestigious Kate Greenaway medal for her illustrations to Edward Lear' s The Quangle Wangle's Hat three years later. But it was a simple idea in 1981 that was to secure her legacy in the children's book sphere: board books for babies. Their fractious third baby, who suffered from eczema, liked looking at images of babies in catalogues, so she turned those into books. 'I thought it would be nice for babies to be able to relate to a young child. You can do a circle, two dots, and a mouth, and they know that's a face,' she says. Oxenbury's illustrations enliven books by authors from Julia Donaldson to Lewis Carroll, yet she did only one book with her husband. There's Going to be a Baby (2010), about a mother expecting her second child, was a particular favourite in my own house as its publication coincided with my second pregnancy. 'I thought, I'm not going to do a haggard mother. I'm going to do one who's got absolute control,' Oxenbury says. EH Shepard is a favourite illustrator ('he moves me') and a handful of framed drawings by Edward Ardizzone are scattered among ones by her and Burningham on the wall next to the stairs, but she has never looked to other artists for inspiration. 'I don't know what people think of my work, I suppose they think it's old-fashioned,' she says. Her own delicate line drawings are the result of years spent watching people, but she never draws outside. 'I can't imagine sitting in the street, sketching. How do people do it? Having people come and look? I like to do it very privately.' She would have liked to have one character she repeated in multiple books, but was never convinced enough by her creations. 'Publishers like you to do the same thing again and again and again, if it's been a good seller. But it's so boring.' Oxenbury's love of drawing started young: she was asthmatic as a child and had hours to kill inside. Are children today too busy to doodle? 'Give them a chance. I don't think kids have enough quiet time. Being bored is all right. They're taken here and taken there. Music lessons and tennis lessons and after school activities. And they're exhausted.' Oxenbury, who is dressed in a grey, collared cashmere cardigan, white T-shirt and soft black yoga trousers, shows no signs of being tired. If she hadn't spent her Friday morning with me, she'd have been doing her regular life drawing class, which she does 'to keep my hand in'. And no, her classmates don't know she's a world-renowned illustrator. Her first collaboration with Rosen for more than 30 years – Oh Dear, Look What I Got! – is out in September. Many animals feature, including a bear, as a trip to the shop goes awry. ('I went to the shop to get me a carrot. Oh dear, they gave me …. a parrot! Oh dear, look what I got! Do I want that? No I do NOT!') But what she'd really like is to illustrate another children's classic. 'I can't think of something but I'd love that. My final thing.'
