Aurora Metro Arts and Media Ltd is a charity providing arts and education projects to schools, libraries, community groups and festivals.
Charity number: 1055116 Company reg. number: 3184467
We act as a catalyst for the development of writers, musicians, performers and artists. We offer opportunities for writers, musicians, performers and artists to become involved in the community through a range of bold, innovative and imaginative projects. We offer volunteers the opportunity to gain skills and experience in a variety of roles.
You can make a charitable donation to support our activities via Paypal – UK donors only: We can claim GIFT AID if you are a UK taxpayer. You can opt out of gift aid if this does not apply.
Virginia Woolf Statue
We’ve launched a campaign to commission, fund and erect a statue of Virginia Woolf in Richmond-on-Thames where she lived with her husband Leonard from 1914 to 1924. Virginia wrote short stories, essays, reviews and novels while living in Richmond. Virginia and Leonard also set up the Hogarth Press together in Richmond publishing works by T.S. Eliot, Katherine Mansfield and Sigmund Freud among many others.
This statue will be the first ever full figure life-size bronze depiction of Virginia Woolf.
For latest news like us on facebook VirginiaWoolfStatue
The Virginia Prize for Fiction
Aurora Metro Arts & Media launched its biennial prize to find new women fiction writers writing in English from around the world in 2009.
The 5th Virginia Prize for Fiction (2017) now open for submissions. Deadline 1 October 2017.
The prize is open to any woman (over 18) around the world, writing in English.
The winner will receive £1,000 and a conditional offer of publication by Aurora Metro Books.
The novel can be of any genre but cannot have been published or self-published before.
Eelpiland: The Birth of Rhythm and Blues
Over the summer and autumn of 2013, Aurora Metro Arts and Media, in association with Arts Richmond and the Eel Pie Club, produced a major arts and education project The Eel Pie Island Music Project about the extraordinary music history of Eel Pie Island in Twickenham.
In the early 1960s, Richmond and Twickenham became the focal point of English R & B and Rock ‘n’ Roll. Two key venues were the Crawdaddy Club in Richmond, and the Eel Pie Hotel Club, located on a small island in the River Thames in Twickenham. The club ‘Eelpiland’ was part of a music revolution that was to change popular music for ever and helped to define an entire era of music history. Its legacy continues to be a major influence on today’s UK music scene.
Buy the book, The British Beat Explosion
Read more about the multi award-winning Rock n Roll Island Documentary
The Green Teen Cookbook Project
Throughout 2011 we worked with local teenagers through workshops held at cafés and youth groups to collate their favourite recipes and tips for healthy eating into a cookbook that was not only written by young people for young people, but also designed and produced by them. As part of this project we also carried out a series of workshops around healthy eating for schools.
How the Vote Was Won
In 2009 we launched a project ‘Suffragettes – 100 Years Performing for the Vote’ to mark the 100th anniversary the formation of the Actresses Franchise League, an organisation of actresses and other workers in theatre – playwrights, directors, stage managers, elocution teachers, male actors – to campaign for votes for women. Part of the project’s aims was to document their work in creating campaigning theatre and record the histories of individuals active in and around the League.The project was support by the Arts Council and for this we staged several suffragette plays at the Orange Tree Theatre. In 2010, with funding from HLF we built on this project and delivered an exhibition on the way the suffragettes used the arts to campaign for the vote, including information about local suffragettes such as Princess Duleep Singh who campaigned on the basis of No Vote No Tax in Hampton Court.