A Year at Calderstones

It's been over a year since we signed the lease on Calderstones Mansion, making it ours for 125 years, and we were able to celebrate how far we've come in the past year at our AGM earlier this month. Throughout the evening, the Mansion fulfilled its purpose of being a home to our group members - some of whom had never visited our home at Calderstones before - who enjoyed good food courtesy of The Reader Cafe and Ice Cream Parlour as well as the atmosphere inside.

At present, nine of our weekly reading groups take place at the Mansion with new groups planned for the future - two of which are starting up in November, giving even more opportunity to visit. It's not only our regular readers who are finding a home for themselves - our volunteering programme is expanding its reach, taking on a team of volunteers of all ages and walks of life to model how our community at Calderstones will work in future, and special visitors such as young people from the City of Readers summer school have already shown the potential of the Mansion as a place to make magic happen.

And the process has already begun...since the signing of the lease in September 2014, we've been able to record some figures on how the Mansion is coming back to life. In just one year, we have:

• shared reading with 20,553 people - an average of 395 each week
• welcomed 4,600 people through the doors for a programme of public literary events
• displayed 44 exhibitions from local artists and organisations at The Reader Gallery
• employed an additional 35 paid members of staff to our enterprises at Calderstones

For more astounding figures from our base at Calderstones, as well as to get a closer view of what's happening within the walls of the Mansion, head over to the Calderstones Mansion blog.

Here's to the future, which we already got a glimpse into by touring the forthcoming Storybarn...