Congratulations to Isle of Wight Hidden Hero John Ackroyd on being honoured with the Freedom of Ryde by his hometown local council, Ryde Town council.
It’s the highest distinction the Town Council can give to an individual.
Ryde East councillor Michael Lilley nominated John as he wanted to laud the Ryde resident who has placed both the town and the Isle of Wight on the world stage through his endeavours.
Cllr Christine Hall, who chairs the Town Council’s Honours Working Party, said,
“He is an inspiration, both to the people of Ryde and the Isle of Wight and to our young people.”
There has been tons of Hidden Heroes things hitting the Isle of Wight recently, so we thought it would be worth doing a quick roundup:
County Press
The County Press were kind enough to devote their Wight Memories page on the 19th Jan 2018 to the Isle of Wight Hidden Heroes project. Plenty of detail in there – as well as a call for the public to submit their own Hidden Heroes.
Style of Wight Magazine
Style of Wight magazine also gave the project a double-page spread.
Look out for IW Hidden Heroes leaflets
Look out for the IW Hidden Heroes leaflets at your favourite Island venues.
To synchronise with the media coverage, we’ve had 30,000 leaflets printed up to give a background on the IW Hidden Heroes project and the first seven Heroes. Of course, there are lots more to come too.
If you run a venue (shop, business) and want to have them available to your customers, just get in touch and we’ll see what we can do about getting them to you.
Great to get support from the BBC on the launch day for the Travelling Museum tour – A big thank you to everyone there!
First off a live slot with Julian Clegg on the Radio Solent breakfast show at 8:20am, which couldn’t have been at a more perfect time for half term.
We got to chat about the whole of the Hidden Heroes project, a couple of the heroes and a chunk of the Travelling Museum idea – plus Julian very kindly read out each of the dates and locations over the rest of the week. Perfect.
Happily Radio Solent covers a huge area over the South, servicing a population of over 1.8m – they have 263,000 listeners a week.
Web coverage from the Beeb too
This was backed up by the BBC’s Web team publishing details to their Live Website later too – including no less than two linked to the IW Hidden Heroes Website.
This site covers the whole of the ‘South’ region, including Berkshire, Oxford, Hampshire and Dorset.
Four hours later, we got a second bite of their Twitter-cherry, as they were kind enough to Tweet out the Hidden Heroes logo and link to their Web coverage.
