Fund for the Future
Help us preserve the historic landscape at Coalbrookdale
In 2017, the Trust was immensely fortunate to have been awarded a National Lottery Heritage Fund (NLHF) £1million match funded endowment grant. The endowment appeal, called Fund for the Future, will create a £2million fund that will significantly help to fund the long-term conservation of precious heritage assets, grade listed buildings and monuments that make up the historic landscape of Coalbrookdale.
Fund for the Future will help us protect internationally recognised heritage assets that played such an important part in the story of the Ironbridge Gorge as the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution that helped shape the society that we live in today. These include the Darby Houses, the Coalbrookdale Company’s long warehouse and other buildings associated with the company, as well as Abraham Darby I’s Old Furnace.
It was here that the Coalbrookdale Company is credited with developing iron working technologies that made the Industrial Revolution possible. In 1708 Abraham Darby I, a Quaker and brassfounder, came to Coalbrookdale and leased the Old Furnace. In early 1709 he successfully made cast iron using coke as the fuel instead of charcoal. The result was cheap iron, produced on a scale much larger than before. The Company expanded rapidly and can put their name to several world firsts, starting in 1709 with cheap cast iron cooking pots, followed by cast iron steam engine cylinders, cast iron wheels, iron rails, cast iron bridge and the first steam railway locomotive. These innovations shaped the Industrial Revolution and the world in which we live in today.
The Trust’s portfolio of monuments and grade listed buildings are in constant need of specialist conservation projects. Without reliable and guaranteed long-term funding, many of these historically important industrial landmarks will be at real risk of deterioration and decay.
Fund for the Future will also help to fund our Education programme for children of all ages, immersing them in the innovative story of the Ironbridge Gorge and STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects linked to the National Curriculum.
Every £1 we raise will be match-funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. To find out more and to make a donation to Fund for the Future, please contact our Fundraising Team at fundraising.manager@ironbridge.org.uk
