Wallace and Gromit's Grand Appeal

Overview

Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Appeal — known for short as The Grand Appeal — is the official charity of Bristol Children’s Hospital in the United Kingdom, founded in 1995 to raise money for a new children’s hospital and still fundraising thirty years later, having generated around £90 million (The Grand Appeal). Its public face is borrowed: the Bristol animation studio Aardman allowed the charity to use its characters Wallace & Gromit to spearhead fundraising, and creator Nick Park and Aardman co-founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton remain active patrons (The Grand Appeal; Third Sector).

The name needs untangling, because three labels circulate for what is essentially one charity family. “The Grand Appeal” is the short working name; the registered charity behind it is Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Foundation, number 1043603; and Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Charity, established in 2003, is the arm that supports sick children in hospitals and hospices throughout the UK rather than in Bristol alone (The Grand Appeal; The Grand Appeal). This profile is about the Bristol charity, and it also records the one episode its own history page leaves out: a £9,500 theft by a man who went on to steal far more from another charity.

Building a children’s hospital

The Grand Appeal began in 1995 with a single mission: to fundraise for a new building for Bristol Children’s Hospital to replace the Victorian building on St Michael’s Hill (The Grand Appeal). Aardman’s Nick Park, Peter Lord and David Sproxton allowed the charity to use Wallace & Gromit for the appeal, and instead of inventing a mascot, the charity built its fundraising around the most famous animated duo in Britain (Third Sector).

A site was found on Upper Maudlin Street, next to the Bristol Royal Infirmary, and building work began; the new purpose-built hospital opened in April 2001, with around 100 patients transferred from the old building, and fundraising reached £12 million (The Grand Appeal). The charity’s own pages differ slightly on the original target — the current main page says £10 million, while the history timeline and Third Sector’s 2026 awards report say £11 million — but the outcome is not in doubt: the appeal succeeded, the Prince of Wales performed the opening ceremony, and the charity stayed on as the hospital’s dedicated charity rather than winding up (The Grand Appeal; Third Sector).

What followed was a steady widening of the mission. In 2002 the charity funded dedicated family accommodation at Ronald McDonald House and a paediatric MRI scanner, the first of its kind in the South West, opened by the Princess Royal (The Grand Appeal). In 2004 it brought music therapy into the hospital, in 2005 it funded a limb reconstruction unit, and in 2010 it launched the Cots for Tots Appeal with the Bristol Evening Post for the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at St Michael’s Hospital, reaching £1 million by 2012 and opening a 12-bedroom home-from-home, Cots for Tots House, for parents of critically ill babies (The Grand Appeal). By 2019 it was funding a 3D Cardiac Bio-printer that prints exact replicas of patients’ hearts to improve care for congenital heart disease (The Grand Appeal).

The trails that made it famous

If the hospital appeal made the charity, the sculpture trails made it a national story. Wrong Trousers Day, launched in 1997 and inspired by Aardman’s Oscar-winning film, became an annual fixture, going national in 2003 with celebrities including Gary Lineker, Ainsley Harriott and Michael Palin (The Grand Appeal). Then came Gromit Unleashed in 2013: 80 giant Gromit sculptures, decorated by artists, celebrities and designers, displayed across Bristol and auctioned for £2.3 million for the children’s hospital (The Grand Appeal; University of Bristol). The University of Bristol’s own account of the auction night records unprecedented demand for the five-foot statues, a live stream watched by more than 17,000 people online, and the university itself paying £20,000 to keep the red-and-white “Bark at Ee” in the city (University of Bristol).

The formula repeated: Shaun in the City in 2015 put 120 Shaun the Sheep sculptures across London and Bristol, and Gromit Unleashed 2 in 2018 raised £2 million (The Grand Appeal). Third Sector reports that Gromit Unleashed alone has raised more than £20 million since 2013 and has grown into a retail operation selling Wallace & Gromit merchandise, with all proceeds going to the charity (Third Sector). In September 2026 the partnership itself won an award: the Grand Appeal–Aardman collaboration was named Medium Corporate Partnership of the Year at the Third Sector Awards, with judges praising a 30-year partnership in which Aardman had embedded its creativity and intellectual property into the charity’s mission rather than merely lending a logo (Third Sector).

The theft that connects it to Article 25

The Grand Appeal’s history has one dark footnote, and it is the reason this profile sits alongside Article 25 in the FactsLedger graph. In December 2015, Scott Golding, then 47, was sentenced at Snaresbrook Crown Court to four years and eight months in prison after pleading guilty to stealing £260,479 from the humanitarian charity Article 25, using its money for designer goods and rent and presenting its senior management with fictitious accounts (Third Sector). The fraud almost closed Article 25, leaving it with just £611 in its account before emergency funds from the architecture and construction industry saved it (Third Sector).

What makes the case relevant here is what came before it. Golding had joined Article 25 to look after its accounts in 2013 after being released from a six-month prison sentence for stealing £9,500 from the Bristol children’s hospital charity, Wallace and Gromit’s Grand Appeal (Third Sector). At Article 25 he worked under his middle name, William, and a Charity Commission spokesman later said the charity had not been aware of the previous conviction and was itself a victim of serious fraud (Third Sector). The Grand Appeal’s own published history does not mention the theft; this profile records it because it is the documented link between the two charities, and because it explains a hiring failure that nearly destroyed one of them.

Today the charity looks forward rather than back. It describes its next project as a new Patient Hotel, the first of its kind in the UK for sick children, to be funded and operated by The Grand Appeal itself (The Grand Appeal). Its stated mission is to put Bristol Children’s Hospital at the centre of change, keeping the hospital at the forefront of children’s healthcare into the next decade and beyond (The Grand Appeal).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state how many children Bristol Children’s Hospital treats each year, because none of the sources read in full gave a current, citable figure. It does not resolve the charity’s own inconsistency over the original appeal target (£10 million on its current main page, £11 million in its history timeline and in Third Sector’s reporting) or over cumulative fundraising (“around £90 million” from the charity, “nearly £100m” from Third Sector’s partnership count); both discrepancies are flagged in the frontmatter rather than silently settled. It does not assert a separate charity registration number for the Wallace & Gromit’s Children’s Charity arm, because the charity’s pages publish only the Foundation’s number, 1043603. And the account of Scott Golding’s theft from this charity rests on Third Sector’s court reporting alone — no court record was read in full — so the £9,500 figure and the six-month sentence are attributed to that reporting, not stated as independently verified court facts.