Bridgetown’s cultural spaces are to be redefined and updated with Queen’s Park to be renamed and made the hub of national culture, Prime Minister Mia Mottley told the House of Assembly Monday.
And lawmakers are to soon make additions to the pantheon of national heroes, she added.
In debate on the appropriations for the 2021-22 fiscal year, Mottley also said the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) should also be relocated to a spot within the capital, with Queen’s Park as the centre of the arts on the island.
She said: “I believe Queen’s Park needs to be redeveloped for the people of this country; it must be the home for creative activity in Barbados because it is central. When those kids are coming from school, or when people are in town, there must be a place they can go and see people rehearsing and dancing, people painting and doing all kinds of fine arts in a little corner of it.
“People rehearsing music and doing whatever they have to do – and to that extent, over the course of the next two years, we want to relocate the headquarters of the National Cultural Foundation back down to town, but we also want to build out different performing and other spaces.”
Noting that the park has played host to famous orators in the past, such as the Jamaican political activist Marcus Garvey, Mottley added that the park’s grounds deserve to be updated to serve not only cultural interests and its surroundings need to be maintained.
She said: “We want to make sure that it is not a derelict place – you go in there and the pond is not working, we have almost become accustomed to things looking pop down, and it must stop. That is why you hear me say to the Minister of Environment and National Beautification [Adrian Forde], and the Minister of Public Works [William Duguid] that Barbados must be cleaned up.”
Mottley also revealed that the National Heroes Act which was first passed by Parliament in 1998 will be revisited soon with the idea of not only adding more figures to the current roster of heroes, but also involving the public’s say in what will replace the current spot where the Lord Nelson statue once occupied in Bridgetown.
The Prime Minister said: “I believe that the time has come, as the Governor General said in the throne speech, for us to re-examine the institution of heroes again, and to ask Barbadians to have a say in two things. One: to recommend who else should be considered for heroes, the installation under the statutory framework for national heroes, and then secondly, to recommend what should take the place of the Lord Nelson statue in National Heroes Square.
“Should it be, a representation of all the heroes, should it be a representation of a family, which I must tell you I am disposed to, because that was the location upon which families were broken up when they landed here from Africa. Should it be some other kind of representation, I do not know, but we will have a two-step process and the Minister in the Ministry of Culture [John King], will help me manage it.” (SB)
