Kilsby Theatre Boat

All hands on deck!

Historic narrowboat Kilsby is being rescued, restored and repurposed as a community boat, offering educational trips, storytelling and theatre on the Oxford waterways.

Thank You!

The Jericho Singers held their Christmas Concert on December 11th at St Barnabas Church in Jericho. Through the generosity of those who went along £1091 was raised for the Kilsby Theatre Boat Project!

We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who shook a bucket, dug into their pockets, or sung their hearts out at this event! Thanks of course also go to Steph Pirrie for organising this much loved local event, and to all those who helped her!

This hefty donation will go towards the restoration of Kilsby's stern
In combination with the generosity of donors from our Spring Celebration at Worcester College earlier this year, this takes us halfway to our fundraising target!

Dreaming of an arty Christmas….

Having some Festive fun with local history and the people who have lived it….

In a project made possible by a Connected Communities Fund from Oxfordshire Community and Voluntary Action (OCVA), Community First Oxfordshire (CFO), and Oxfordshire County Council, we partnered up with The Parasol Project to create a series of Christmas cards that celebrated the living heritage Oxford's Northway estate, the home of Parasol.
Working alongside adults with and without additional needs, we used ipads to capture images of the estate, and held conversations with long-term local residents to gather stories about how the estate has changed since its creation in the 1950s.
Karis Harrington represented the ambitions of the Kilsby Theatre Boat Project. She started with the digital images of the neighbourhood captured by the adults at Parasol, and the nuggets of oral history from the local residents, and using her artistic wizardry combined stories of the past and present into really exciting festive artworks that delight the eye!

In the design here, you can see local resident Frank's dad, a butcher, "Early 1939 John Edward Chesman arrived in Oxford by bicycle from Grimsby, a distance of 168 miles in 2 days. Travelling with my uncle they slept overnight under a bridge, they were woken by police suspecting them of being part of the IRA S-campaign".

We hope to partner with the Parasol Project when they make one of their regular jaunts to Wolvercote Young People's Club in the summer holidays, just a stone's throw from the Oxford Canal. There we will get the opportunity to explore some more ways of interpreting heritage with a waterways twist!

Thanks go to everyone at the Parasol Project, Northway residents Frank, Pam and Pat, and Councillor Barbara Coyne for making this project happen, and of course the funders at OCVA, CFO and OCC.

Restore Kilsby's Stern!

DONATE NOW!

We are delighted to be launching the next phase of the Kilsby Theatre Boat Fundraising campaign.

So far, with your help, Kilsby has been rescued from a watery grave and transported safely to Tooley’s Historic Boatyard in Banbury, where the glorious hull has been safeguarded and wrapped in an enormous new steel slipper (thanks to the Lucy Group of Oxford).

The Kilsby team of volunteers, consultants and experts are working on the exciting long term plans for turning Kilsby into a heritage trip boat and theatre space. Meanwhile, down to immediate practicalities - to restore Kilsby’s hull completely we need to replace the damaged stern and bring it back to its original glory.

DONATE!