Welcome!

Welcome to Discovering Places and welcome to our blog. Discovering Places is the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad campaign to give people throughout the UK the opportunity to engage with their local environment – natural, built and historic. I hope this blog will be a great way of getting you involved in our activities.

I am proud that the Heritage Alliance, which I chair, is leading Discovering Places. We first suggested the idea of an environment project as part of the Cultural Olympiad to LOCOG (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) back in 2006, and our Project Director, Ian Lush (Deputy Chair of the Alliance) has worked with LOCOG ever since to devise a programme which gives people the chance to take part wherever they are. Our Project Manager, Claire Horan, is now working with partner organisations such as the Royal Geographical Society, Bristol Natural History Consortium and the Geography Collective to devise events and activities aimed at people of all ages, and the first theme for our blog and the month of August is the natural environment.

We’d like you to take advantage of the summer, get outside with your friends and relations and tell us about your local green spaces. You can share your places to go, send us your photos and join the conversation on our page or leave comments on the blog. Follow the links on the bottom of the page. You can also get involved in ‘Meet the Species‘, our race to find 2,012 species in the UK before the Games begin next year. You don’t have to go to the country: it could be your garden, local park, a city square or a village green. Have a look around and see what animals, plants and insects you can spot, then blog here and tell us all about them.

We believe that the London 2012 Olympics are a great way of getting people to take part in new activities, and Discovering Places is the ideal place to start!

 

Loyd Grossman, Chair, The Heritage Alliance