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A couple, Johanna Naradzay and her husband Barry Pope are setting up an aquarium with the aim of educating the public about marine conservation.
The public aquarium will have 14 large tanks full of marine life, displays and interactive videos, multimedia, marine mammal skeletons, fossils and other artefacts.
Initially it will use two floors of the building, located in Church Street, but the long-term aim is to use all four floors, as well as using the outside pavilion in the garden.
I wish them well, but with Blue Reef in Newquay (which also has a zoo) and an aquarium in Plymouth, I do hope they're not over-egging the cake, as it were...
This is good news. I lament the stranglehold that the SeaLife brand (Merlin) currently exerts over the UK aquaria scene. Each of the SeaLife aquariums has a depressing sameness to it, with their shark tunnels, ray pools, kingdoms of the seahorse, etc. There's no variety, no scope, to the exhibits, just homogeneity. I miss the independent aquariums that were once a feature of almost every British coastal town but, with precious few exceptions, are now no more.