Awards and Presentations

A week of awards and presentations!

On Tuesday afternoon it was over to Witney for a "public" gathering regarding the "Festival for Heroes" concert application (for up to 29,999 persons to attend a one-day concert here on 20 June 2009) - a useful opportunity to present details of the event and to answer questions - or should that be - alleviate fears and concerns! The hoops surrounding such processes do seem to get more bureaucratic each year and it does lead one to fear the day when such events will become unviable due to the legislative burden and the compliance obligations. Let's hope sense prevails over time because our special events programme is vital to our long term survival - especially given the lack of any external funding support for the restoration and conservation of the Palace and its environs. It is not in our interests to run bad events - we will always strive to run events that are fully compatible - both internally with all that we strive to achieve and externally with our local community.

On Thursday it was up to York for the Enjoy England Awards for Excellence where we were shortlisted in the "Large Visitor Attraction of the Year" category - together with Harewood House in Leeds and the Science Museum in London. The awards evening was held in the impressive National Railway Museum and the host for the evening was the hilarious Michael MacIntyre who had everyone in stitches with his sharply observed take on life around England - great fun and a great talent. As we sat under the shadow of the "Winston Churchill" steam locomotive (which seems like a pretty good omen!!) we eventually ended up winning the Silver Award - of course we were gutted not to win the Gold Award (which incidentally went to Harewood House - one of our Treasure Houses colleagues - well done to them) but we were also very proud to get this close and to win such a prestigious national award. A great credit to everyone! We drank some champagne; congratulated our rivals and other winners; and vowed to return and win Gold very soon!

On Friday it was back down to Blenheim Palace to help support everyone with the Annual Heritage Awards presented by the Duke to various schools and school children in recognition of their amazingly talented work submissions which are received by the Education Department following their school visits to Blenheim Palace. This is a wonderful event which the Duke clearly thoroughly enjoys - and to see the pride displayed through Head Teachers, Teachers and Parents is fantastic as their children go up to receive their awards from the Duke. These awards epitomise everything good about Blenheim Palace - it is such a wonderful resource for all ages and the quality of work produced is outstanding - Blenheim clearly reaches them all so strongly and inspires such vision and creativity in their work. Well done to Karen Wiseman and Antonia Kearney (our highly talented Education team) and to all of the Guides and Operations staff who work so hard for this big day in their calendar. It was a great success all round - and the yummy tea was demolished - hardly a chocolate brownie in sight - but I do hope that children were not being sick in the back of cars as they were driven home!!

Tonight sees the annual Churchill Memorial Concert in the Palace with around 200 people attending - the address this year will be given by Sir Christopher Meyer (former British Ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2003 and currently Chairman of the Press Complaints Commission) - hopefully once again this high profile event will raise good money for lots of worthy local causes.

Fox move on site on Sunday for three weeks filming activity with "Gullivers Travels" - should be fun but operationally challenging!

Numbers have stayed strong through the week and April is beating all records as our "Buy One Day - Get 12 Months Free!" campaign continues to connect strongly - all looks promising but then it is raining this morning - the weather always has the ability to "dampen" our enthusiasm and remind us that it can all be too fragile!

Hopefully the blue sky and sunshine will re-appear very soon - together with our smiles!

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Easter, Heroes and Awards

Another week has passed (weeks at Blenheim Palace seem to pass quicker than anywhere else!) and we can reflect on the Easter weekend.

Despite praying for blue sky and sunshine, we ended up with a fairly miserable 4 days of weather with blue sky only making a first appearance around lunchtime on Easter Monday. Despite this we traded very strongly and the "Butterflies and Bunnies" Easter Egg trail at the Pleasure Gardens was hugely popular - my little girls avoided getting lost in the huge Marlborough Maze and needed only a little help from mummy + daddy (and anyone else they could find to ask!) - they are though still buried under the weight of chocolate at home! The 4 days of Easter 09 saw visitor numbers 80% up on the snowy conditions of Easter 08 - a fantastic outcome given the overcast conditions and this continues our strong trading performance since opening in mid-February. This represents our highest Easter attendance at least back to 1997! The "Buy One Day - Get 12 Months Free!" offer is still connecting very strongly with all of our visitors and we have a growing army of annual pass holders that we hope will connect with us very strongly over the coming months - all very exciting and very positive.

Today has seen the exciting announcement and launch of the "Festival for Heroes" one day concert on Saturday 20 June 2009 - 10 acts have been announced (including Gabrielle, Lulu, All Angels, Blake, Escala and The Automatic) and the one day event will target to raise substantial monies for the Royal British Legion and for Soldiers of Oxfordshire. Very worthy causes that we are pleased to help support and a wonderfully eclectic all-british line-up that everyone should enjoy watching on the day. It does feel very appropriate that Sir Winston Churchill's birthplace should host this event in support of our armed forces and hopefully ticket demand will be strong and the event will meet its targets.

This does virtually now complete our events calendar and we are going to have a very busy summer with "something for everyone" to enjoy through the year - we do though need good weather to ensure good ground for all of our events so the prayers continue for lots of blue sky and sunshine! Our full events listing can be found on the "Whats On" pages of our website.

We have also signed contracts for some major location filming to take place here in the coming weeks - this will be very high profile for Blenheim Palace; very exciting and buzzy to have them with us for around three weeks, but very challenging in delivering excellent customer service to our normal day visitors alongside the filming requirements. We like challenges and I am confident that we can deliver through the excellence and dedication of our staff. It will be a "giant" of a movie when released in Summer 2010.

Next week will be exciting as we go up to York on Thursday evening for the Enjoy England Awards for Excellence event. We are shortlisted in the Large Visitor Attraction category of these highly prestigious national awards and we hope to be able to report success. Everyone has their fingers crossed as this would mean so much to The Duke and to the whole team to receive such recognition.

We hope the weekend weather will be kind and that the annual OX5 fun run - to be started by David Cameron MP who will then also take part in the run - will raise lots of money for local causes.

Life at "Britain's Greatest Palace" rolls on - and we remain pleased to be still in reasonably good shape with lots to look forward to over the coming months.

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Praying for a sunny Easter

Back from the Austrian slopes just about in one piece - despite a mighty crunching fall on day one in near blizzard conditions - and now heading into our first bank holiday weekend of the 2009 season.

Easter is such an important milestone (albeit frustratingly the date is such a moveable feast each year) and the weather can so dictate how we perform. Hopefully the snow during Easter 08 will not repeat and hopefully the slightly dodgy forecast for Easter 09 will edge in our favour with more blue sky + sunshine than black clouds + rain! Time to keep fingers crossed and we hope families will be tempted out to enjoy our Great Blenheim Palace Easter Egg Challenge - "Butterflies and Bunnies Trail".

Our visitor business continues to perform very strongly into April and we are significantly ahead of last years performance - this bodes well for the year ahead and helps support performance within our shops and catering outlets. All very positive given the general economic malaise - we are delighted to be offering such a strong value-for-money offer in these tough times and to be able to connect so positively with so many families across Oxfordshire and beyond. More than 20,000 annual passes have been created since we opened on 14 February and we look forward to converting many more day tickets over the coming months.

The increased business does put pressure - I hope positive uplifting pressure - onto all of our staff and I would pay enormous credit to their enthusiasm, their hard work, their professionalism and their continued efforts throughout each day. We do take great care every day to offer the best customer service experience possible from receiving the first visitor in the morning to waving goodbye to the last visitor in the evening - we do not always get this 100% right but everyone (without exception) tries very hard and takes great pride in acting as ambassadors here at "Britain's Greatest Palace". My continued thanks are extended to each and every one of them for their hard work - they are all exceptional individuals.

Future business prospects continue to evolve in a positive manner - contracts are virtually signed for a major filming contract here at Blenheim Palace in the coming weeks and an application has been lodged with West Oxfordshire District Council for a licence to allow up to 29,999 people to attend an outdoor one day "Festival for Heroes" event on Saturday 20 June 2009 where hopefully significant monies will be raised for the Royal British Legion and for the local Soldiers for Oxfordshire campaign. More news on both will follow imminently and hopefully the "Festival for Heroes" event will be fully announced immediately after Easter - exciting times all round.

This last week has also seen a successful first sale here at Blenheim Palace for Lyon and Turnbull plus the launch of our new Trout Fishery initative - an example if needed of the hugely diverse world that exists across the Estate on a day to day and week to week basis.

Blenheim Palace and its surrounding Estate are totally unique and it is an absolute pleasure to work here - the place gets totally inside you and it is an immense honour to be responsible, along with everyone else, for the management and future conservation of this wonderful world heritage site.

Enjoy Easter - eat lots of chocolate - and I hope I can report a successful weekend when I next write!

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