Saluting Bath's people of 2008

As readers of the Bath Chronicle will have seen in our New Year's Day edition we have just unveiled our first ever 'People Of The Year'


The idea was to honour the people, companies and organisations who we felt had made the most dramatic impact on Bath and the surrounding towns and villages during 2008.


Of course it would have been impossible to salute everyone from our great community but we think the 70 individuals, eight events, eight companies, 11 arts shows, six sports teams and six local bands we featured represents a pretty good snapshot of just some of the 'best of Bath' in 2008.


The initial reaction to our mini ‘New Year Honours’ from nominees implies the idea has been well received so our planning for the 2009 awards begins now. And the great thing is - every single citizen/company/sports team/band etc has a chance to be nominated!


For the record, the winners of our two biggest awards – the man and woman of the year – were Grenville Jones for his work in taking the City of Bath Male Choir to TV stardom and his fantastic achievements with the Golden-Oldies and Gitte Dawson for her brilliant leadership of the King Bladud Pigs project. They are pictured here.




Elsewhere we chose winners in various categories such as Bath Rugby, Ben Rushgrove, Great Western Wine, Carol Spalding, Mike Whitaker, Susie Wright, Nicholas Coombes, Ann Garner, Martin Tracy, Paul Mattausch-Burrows, The Volt, Charlie McDonnell, Dan Biggane and the irrepressible and much-admired Loraine Morgan-Brinkhurst.


There is no room to list all the runners-up but you can find them in the Chronicle or at our website (http://www.thisisbath.co.uk/) and we truly believe all our 100 plus nominees were fully deserving of cheers.




The 2009 awards nominations are now open!