Category: News from Stanfords

Stanfords have donated a prize for a fundraising dinner in aid of a baby home in Mwanza, Tanzania. Forever Angels is an organisation providing orphaned and abandoned babies with care in their formative years. The staff work to keep Tanzanian families together and where a child has no family they ensure he/she is adopted into a stable, loving home.

Volunteer and fundraiser Alexandra Campbell says, “There are thousands of orphans in Tanzania, mainly due to the Aids pandemic, but there are few homes or orphanages that provide the same levels of love, care and attention as Forever Angels. Not only does the home take care of up to 50 infants at a time, the home provides work for many Tanzanians in the surrounding area.

On 13 November, the charity is holding a dinner for 250 people, with an auction and raffle, at the Globe Theatre in London. Rugby player Will Greenwood and actor Scott Maslen are supporting the event and more celebrities are lined up. They aim to raise up to £50,000 for the orphanage which is enough to cover running costs for six months. Stanfords provided The Times Comprehensive Atlas of the World for a raffle prize.

The home also provides local teenage orphans with career opportunities, giving them a roof over their head and a safe environment whilst training them in childcare, first aid, cooking and teaching them English. At the end of their internship, these orphans have the opportunity to gain a job at the baby home. Alexandra adds, “In this way, the home is playing a vital role in the community of Mwanza.”

For more information on their work, visit the Forever Angels website: www.foreverangels.org.

Author: Rachel Ricks

Find out how Halloween and its traditions first started, how the jack o’ lantern came about, and how the festival is celebrated in other parts of the world…

How did Halloween start?

Halloween has its roots in an ancient Celtic celebration associated with All Saints’ Day, which falls on 1 November, so the night before became known as “All Hallows’ Eve”, eventually contracting to Hallowe’en. (Hallow is old English for ‘holy person’ or ‘saint’.)

How did we start celebrating it like we do today?

Irish migrants carried versions of the tradition to North America during Ireland’s Great Famine of the 1840s. They had established Halloween activities such as bobbing for apples, as the festival was also a celebration of the end of harvest.

How did the pumpkin head come about?

The ancient Celts would place a skeleton on their windowsill to represent the departed. These lanterns were first carved from a turnip. Believing that the head was the most powerful part of the body, containing the spirit and the knowledge, the Celts used the “head” of the vegetable to frighten off the embodiment of superstitions.

The jack-o’-lantern can be traced back to the Irish legend of Stingy Jack, a farmer who tricked the devil into climbing a tree and trapped him by carving a cross into the tree trunk. In revenge, the devil placed a curse on Jack, condemning him to forever wander the earth at night with just a candle in a hollowed turnip. The use of pumpkins began in North America as pumpkins are more readily available and much larger, making them easier to carve than turnips.

How is it celebrated round the world?

‘Halloween’ on 31 October is celebrated predominantly in North America and the British Isles, with ‘trick or treating’, jack-o’-lanterns, fancy-dress costumes and so on. In Roman Catholic countries throughout Europe, and the Philippines and Mexico, All Saints’ Day is observed instead. On this day offerings are made, and people light candles in cemeteries in honour of the dead.

This summer, Stanfords teamed up with literary magazine Litro, asking for your wildest and strangest holiday, adventure or travel experience in less than 201 words. In other words, we asked for your story on a postcard…

Now summer’s over, the team at Litro have sifted through the drifts of electronic ‘postcards’ you sent in and these lucky writers came out on top: Continue reading Postcard writing competition

Stanfords is sponsoring a cyclist and music enthusiast on a solo bicycle expedition covering over 6,000 miles. On his way from the southern tip of South America to the Caribbean Sea, Peter Hubbard will be making audio recordings of the vibrant musical culture the continent is renowned for and will travel through mountains, deserts and rainforest.

The expedition, Rhythm Cycle, starts in November and will be a low budget trip. Peter, aged 27, will carry all he needs on his bicycle; he will sleep in a small tent and cook on a stove and he says there will be no support team, high-tech communications equipment or GPS. His journey begins in Buenos Aires, the home of Tango. Next stop, Ushuaia, the most southerly city on earth. Heading north, he will tackle the notoriously gruelling Careterra Austral in Chile – the remote gravel road through rugged glaciated mountains constructed at the request of Pinochet in the 1970s. Continue reading Stanfords sponsors bicycle expedition to discover the sounds of South America

An innovative ‘sculpture man’ has constructed a one-of-its-kind model of a relief map of Ghana, using topographic maps from Stanfords.

Dave Taylor was commissioned by the Lighthouse Chapel International, based in Ghana, to produce a relief map of the country, so they could use it to place markers representing their various building projects throughout Ghana.

The sculptor and modelmaker, whose studio is near Southend, Essex, bought some topographic maps of Ghana from Stanfords. Dave says, “We needed some detailed maps and everyone I asked suggested Stanfords. I found the website and staff on the phone very useful. I also got a good book on Ghana, which went some way to convince my client that I was serious about the project.”

Within just five weeks Dave and his assistant Phil Harlow had produced a 1:250,000 scale relief map of the African country, complete with magnetic surface so that markers could be fixed and changed as necessary. He aimed to show as many natural features as he could fit in, but features had had to be exaggerated, as Ghana is quite flat, and at that scale, their tallest point would have been just 3mm high.

He says, “It was very hard work, despite the small scale, the objects themselves were large, awkward things, and the moulds more so. We were under pressure for time, space was limited (we made it as big as my studio could allow) and everything was under such scrutiny, there were so many towns, the names of which were unfamiliar, and politically the map of Ghana has undergone quite some changes over the years (the maps we had date from the 60s, but were still the most up-to-date we could get). But it is a fascinating country; I would like to visit it some day.”

  There has been some discussion on an extension to the project, and Dave says he has found that there are very few people producing the same kind of work. He adds, “The modelling of a whole country is very satisfying. My assistant and I are both Lord of the Rings fans, so we have discussed a self-initiated project based on that as a way of promoting our services and aim to start work on that this autumn.”

Dave Taylor can be contacted at:

Unit 8 Park Place, R/o 14 Park Street, Westcliff-on-Sea,

Essex SS0 7PA, tel: 07968 500 602 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting 07968 500 602 end_of_the_skype_highlighting; website: www.taylorandharlow.com; email: [email protected].

Author: Rachel Ricks

The World Heritage Committee recently held its 33rd session and has inscribed two new natural sites and 11 cultural sites on Unesco’s World Heritage List. Since Unesco also withdrew one site from the List, Dresden Elbe Valley (Germany), the list now numbers a total of 890 properties. During this session Burkina Faso, Cape Verde and Kyrgyzstan had their first World Heritage sites inscribed on Unesco’s List of properties recognized as having outstanding universal value. Continue reading Unesco announces 13 new World Heritage sites

The winner of the 2009 Bradt Travel Guides/Independent on Sunday Travel Writing Competition was announced at the Award Ceremony held at Stanfords, London.

Hilary Bradt, Chairman of Bradt Travel Guides, said the quality of the writing this year surpassed all previous years making the task of choosing the short-listed six finalists extremely difficult.

Well known journalist and travel writer Matthew Parris had the unenviable task of choosing the overall winner. Continue reading Winner of 2009 travel writing competition announced

“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”

These are the words spoken by John F Kennedy on the 25th of May, 1961, on announcing his aspiration to send astronauts to the Moon before the end of the decade. Incredibly, only eight years later, Apollo 11 achieved this goal by becoming the first manned spacecraft to land on the Moon. Since 20 July 2009 marks the 40th anniversary of this extraordinary achievement, we at Stanfords decided to muster up some interesting facts about the Apollo 11 mission to the Moon…

Did you know that… Continue reading 'The Eagle Has Landed'