LONDON — Britain’s Prince William is set to return to official royal duties on Thursday for the first time since his wife Kate, the Princess of Wales, announced she was receiving treatment for cancer.
William, the Prince of Wales and heir to the throne, will visit west London and the adjacent county of Surrey to highlight the work of community and environmental impact organizations in the area, Kensington Palace said in a statement on Tuesday.
They will be William’s first public engagements since Kate made the shock admission nearly a month ago that she was undergoing chemotherapy for an as-yet unspecified form of cancer.
In the weeks before the news became public William, 41, canceled a number of engagements, including a memorial service for his godfather, King Constantine of Greece, as he juggled being with his wife and looking after their children.
After Kate’s video announcement, the couple missed the Easter Sunday service in Windsor, a high-profile annual royal engagement.
On Thursday William will visit Surplus to Supper, a food bank that distributes more than three metric tons of food per day, much of which would otherwise go to landfill. He will also stop by a youth center in West London to which the food bank sends regular donations.
“Protecting the environment for future generations is one of The Prince of Wales’s key priorities and in 2020 he launched The Earthshot Prize, a global environmental prize and platform to discover, award, celebrate and scale ground-breaking solutions to repair and regenerate the planet,” Kensington Palace said.
William is following in the footsteps of his father King Charles III, who has long championed environmental and social causes.
William was at a soccer match in Birmingham last week, watching his beloved Aston Villa with his son George, in what was the pair’s first public appearance since the news of Kate’s diagnosis.
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