Windfalls boost Yorkshire’s Georgian grandeur

York Council welcomed the award to improve access, displays and conservation at the 18th Georgian town house.

This grant follows a Council decision to invest £736,000 in the project.

Once restoration work is completed the Mansion House will open to the public five days a week as opposed to three it currently opens.

In Richmond, North Yorkshire, plans for a new education and learning centre at the Georgian Theatre Royal have been boosted with a £286,000 Heritage Lottery grant.

The new centre will be created in the studio building and will be in memory of former associate director Paul Iles, who left a bequest of over £231,000 when he died in 2011.

The grant will also fund a new online archive which will focus on Samuel Butler, the actor-manager who built the Theatre in 1788.

Plans for a Holocaust heritage centre at Huddersfield University received development funding of £59,000 from the Lottery fund. The money will help Leeds-based Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association progress plans to apply for a full grant of £520,000 for the project.

Inspired by survivors the centre will provide opportunities for communities, teachers, students and school children to learn about the Holocaust through photographs, digital testimonies, records of persecution, family letters and artefacts.

Lilian Black, chairman of the Association, said: “We are thrilled at this vote of confidence in our work here in the North of England.

“The Centre is an exciting investment in all of our futures and reflects the values of Britain.

“It is so important that we learn the lessons of the Holocaust to ensure our past fate does not become our future again.

“Over recent years we have been able to collect digital testimony, gather thousands of photographs and access survivors’ records of Nazi persecution through the International Tracing Service in Germany and have built strong partnerships in the UK and internationally which can now be brought together in a wonderful community resource at Heritage Quay within the University of Huddersfield, all thanks to the Heritage Lottery.”