Stop Press – Award for Barnard Park

Honored to receive Lisa Pontecorvo award

I am very pleased to tell you that Islington Council has awarded our chair Dianne Browning the Lisa Pontecorvo Award 2013.

The terms of the award recognise “an outstanding contribution to the Islington community by enhancing and preserving the parks and green space amenities of the borough and/or bringing communities closer together through their work in parks and green spaces”.

The award is a fantastic tribute to all who have worked so hard together (in all weathers) on planting, gardening, events etc in the park, as well as to Dianne’s outstanding work in tirelessly pulling all this together. It has brought tangible order where disorder ruled. I can assure you that the competition was stiff, as there were nominations from numerous keen park groups in the Borough. The award brings £1000 to the park for further projects.

The background is that Lisa Pontecorvo, the doughty social campaigner of Caledonian Ward who brought the formerly derelict Edward’s Square to a remarkable flowering, died aged 64 in 2008, knocked from her bicycle in the Holloway Road.

The award is owed to the generosity of her family, who endowed it in her memory. Lisa’s father Guido was the esteemed Professor of Genetics in Glasgow, the eldest of a family of eight that included Gillo the great film maker (The Battle of Algiers) and Bruno, the nuclear physicist who was a key figure in teasing out the properties of neutrinos and muons and who defected to the Soviet Union in 1950.

Their early life was in Pisa, but the entire family had to flee Italy in the face of Mussolini’s notorious Manifesto della Razza in 1938. Lisa’s energy and commitment continued her family’s early dreams of a better new order for Europe.

Best regards,

John Scholes, Treasurer, Friends of Barnard Park

 

 

 

This entry was posted in Park Business. Bookmark the permalink.

Comments are closed.