Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Friday the 27th of February.

I'm delighted to be meeting one of the most significant people in the whole world of culture and heritage.

He is Darren Henley. He's the chief executive of Arts Council, England.

But for the purposes of our conversation today, he's also the chair of the National Lottery Forum.

I've come to meet Darren to find out what is going to be happening between the 7th and the 15th of March.

Darren, welcome.

Between the 7th and 15th of March, we've got National Lottery Open Week.

That's an opportunity to say thank you to all the National Lottery players across this country

who raise 32 million pounds every week for good causes.

And good causes like the founding museum here in the

centre of London, which is one of those most amazing and special museums, which is a museum

for young people who've been in care and tells their story and amazing stories that they

have. And it's one of the places where you can come and have, with your lottery ticket,

a really special experience. And there's so many more around the country as well.

How does this work? I have a lottery ticket. What do I do? Just show up? Yeah, if you've got your lottery ticket, you might have the paper ticket, or you might have bought a ticket on the app on your mobile. And if you go on to, just do a search for National Lottery Open Week online, you'll find there's a whole

range of different things up and down the country right across the UK. All four nations

have got something and plenty of things happening and they might be heritage buildings,

there might be National Trust properties, you can go bird watching with the RSPB. There's so many

different things you can do and you can get a special discount maybe or a special experience that you wouldn't normally be able to have over those few days.

Can you give me some more examples of the sorts of things that people would be able to enjoy perhaps close to them in various parts of the UK?

Yeah, sure. I've got a list of some of the things that I'm really excited about. I was searching through the website to see them all. So you could go and see some rare archive footage at the BFI National Archive. You could go and escape from the cells at Manchester Police Museum. You could go and listen to the Royal Scottish National Orchestra with a world premiere of Eleanor Langa's The Life of Birds.

You could maybe, if you're down in Kent in Ashford, you could go to a free dance class

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