The Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust, in association with Wigtown Festival Company, will launch the Peter Pan Moat Brae Lecture Series on Saturday 28th May at 7pm when architect and writer Edward Hollis will speak in an inaugural event at Moat Brae House, Dumfries.
Edward Hollis is author of the acclaimed The Memory Palace: A Book of Lost Interiors and The Secret Lives of Buildings, he is also Reader in Interior Design and Deputy Director of Research at Edinburgh College of Art in the University of Edinburgh. He will speak about the way buildings change over time, shaped by and shaping those who inhabit them. He argues that the built environment is as eloquent as any storyteller and that the homes we live in are always more than bricks and mortar. Nowhere has this been more evident than at Moat Brae, the childhood inspiration for JM Barrie’s Peter Pan.
This is the first in a series of events co-hosted by Wigtown Festival Company and the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust. The series will complement the renovation of the house and garden and its development into a national centre for children’s literature and storytelling. Edward Hollis is an architect by training, he worked for six years in the practice of Richard Murphy and has recently been involved in the project to restore the iconic St Peter’s Seminary in Cardross.
Tickets £6, under 25s, students and unemployed free. Available from Midsteeple Box Office 01387 258550 and online from www.ticketsource.co.uk/wigtownfestivalcompany .
Dame Barbara Kelly, Chairman of the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust said: “This is a very exciting new series for the Peter Pan Moat Brae Trust. In recent years we have been able to bring some wonderful speakers to Wigtown Book Festival, including our Patron Joanna Lumley and Daniel Hahn – Editor of The Oxford Companion to Children’s Literature, but this will be the beginning of the Moat Brae Lecture Series to be presented in the house itself. Edward Hollis’ fascination with buildings and the stories they have to tell is so appropriate to Moat Brae and we look forward to developing this series with the region’s amazing literature experts – Wigtown Festival Company.”
The Trust has a further £500,000 to raise before the final phase of capital works begin this Autumn. The partially renovated House and Garden will open for a number of exhibitions and open days over the summer before contractors move in. Further details can be found on their website www.peterpanmoatbrae.org
