I'm 34 and live in Shrewsbury – a fabulous town and an untapped resource of culture and history. It was the home of Charles Darwin, the modern Olympics and the birthplace of the industrial revolution. It was described by Nikolaus Pevsner as England's finest Tudor town. I work as the heritage project manager for Shropshire council, which involves taking these historical themes and promoting them through museums and galleries. One of our projects is to develop a higher education institution in Shrewsbury, which I feel would be a very culturally rich place to study.
The Guardian has always been very important for me as it has always supported protection of the arts and recognised how important they can be in upholding social cohesion and cultural identity. In Shrewsbury the local authority has worked hard to preserve the arts as it recognises this importance.
The Guardian has a great breadth of information and reporting and it is good to have an insight into such a range of issues with an objective stance. I have been reading the paper since my undergraduate degree in Bangor in 1999. I first picked it up as a keen musician who loved the coverage of art and music.
I'm an old-school reader and always buy the newspaper. There is something important to me about sitting down and detaching myself from the digital world – I find it therapeutic. When you are reading a newspaper article you absorb the content in a different way, an art that should not be lost in our digital age.
