George Eliot Visitor Centre set to open in 2020

Warickshire County Council, in partnership with the George Eliot Fellowship (GEF), is financing a consultancy study to develop the George Eliot visitor offer in Warwickshire.

The study has two main aspects: a) support with business planning for the GEF to create a visitor centre at Griff House just outside Nuneaton and b) a longer-term development plan to improve and link the wider George Eliot offer at multiple sites around Warwickshire.

John Burton, GEF Chair, commented: “For seven years the Fellowship has been trying to get a George Eliot Visitor Centre at Griff, where the author lived for her first 21 years. It has been a long process but in October, thanks to a very generous donation, it finally raised the amount needed to start work.

"It is expected that the Centre will open in 2020 when the Fellowship will embark on its next great stride forward towards placing Eliot more prominently in north Warwickshire to complement the other Warwickshire writer from the south of the county!”

2019, the bicentenary of the author’s birth, has been a great success and has raised awareness locally of the great Victorian novelist after an ambitious series of events arranged by the Fellowship.

These included enhanced regular events like George Eliot readings by Gabriel Woolf and in local churches by the Fellowship, working with choirs; lectures, talks and slide shows to community groups, work with schools and with George Eliot Hospital and cooperation with the local authority in putting on events to honour her memory.

Exciting events have also taken place as a result of Fellowship sponsorship or encouragement. They worked with Sudden Impulse Theatre Company to produce outdoor performances of a dramatised version by Vivienne Wood of a short story set in Arbury called Mr Gilfil’s Love Story. This was performed in two other venues. The Fellowship commissioned Lesley Smith to create a one-hour presentation of Eliot’s life which was performed to big audiences in three venues and is now part of Smith’s repertoire for future years. With a grant from the Nicholas Chamberlaine Trust the Fellowship has produced a children’s version of Silas Marner which will be distributed to all local primary schools.

Sudden Impulse also produced six performances of their own version of Silas Marner The Musical to great acclaim. Nuneaton Rotary and the Fellowship paid for a bespoke steel bench designed by local artist Alisha Miller which is now proudly outside the Town Hall.

These events were spread out over the year but nationally celebrations tended to be in the birthday week in November. There were very well attended events at the Senate House in London and at the British Library; the National Portrait Gallery displayed all their Eliot portraits in one place; in Coventry and Nuneaton the museums made special efforts to mount exhibitions and local photographers repeated work done in 1919 by their forbears. On the birthday itself wreaths were laid in Nuneaton, at Griff, at Highgate and in Westminster Abbey.