Raikes Consort is a collective of instrumentalists and singers from the University of Cambridge. Founded by artistic director Jamie Conway in 2018, their first performance was of Handel's formidable Dixit Dominus, the various choral scholars singing two to a part. The consort performs separately as an orchestra and choir, as well as together for larger choral works. Find out more at the links below.

 

The consort is named after Robert Raikes "the Younger" (1736-1811) who was a philanthropist and Anglican layman from Gloucester in the west of England. Raikes was a pioneer of the Sunday school movement, which he first developed in Gloucester from 1780 for impoverished and factory bound boys. He publicised the teaching in the Gloucester Journal which he inherited from his father, and, bearing most of the early costs himself, several schools were set up around the city within two years, later also admitting girls. By 1831 Sunday schools were educating 1,250,000 children, around a quarter of the population, and are therefore seen as the precursor to the state education system the UK now benefits from.

 

Robert Raikes' House, sometime location of one of Raikes' Sunday schools, maintains a beautiful frontage on Southgate Street in the centre of Gloucester, and is now the location of the consort's spiritual home, the Robert Raikes Inn.