Dorset’s highways and byways, countryside and coast have provided inspiration to some of our greatest artists at least since Turner and Constable went canvas to canvas under its skies in the early 19th century. So to find artists from the much-feted East London Group between the wars were just as taken with its scenery is Read More…
Tag: Weymouth
Moon talk
Commissioned by Dorset Moon, Weymouth based artist Ra Zamora has created Call of the Wild, a sound installation inspired by the wolf’s howl that will play as part of the Under the Moon supporting programme at all three locations. It’s intended to create a primordial experience to transport people to the wild corners of their psyche, Read More…
The long shadow of The Longest Day
Seventy-five years after the event it’s almost impossible to imagine what it would have been like for Portlanders to be awoken in the early hours of Tuesday 6 June 1944 by the din of 30,000 American servicemen preparing to be shipped across the Channel to launch the Normandy landings, D-Day. As dawn broke on The Read More…
Picture perfect – Weymouth’s camera man
A dozen or so cardboard boxes, many without lids, sit on shelves at Dorset History Centre waiting to surrender their secrets. They contain some 7000 packets of negatives that effectively constitute the last 30 years of photographer Graham Herbert’s working career in and around Weymouth – an important visual record of everyday life from a Read More…
From the bench to the streets
Unemployed workers complaining bitterly about foreigners ‘pouring’ into the country… Not from today’s news, but the Southern Times of 11 September 1926 and a report about Harold Stevens, a well-respected Weymouth magistrate on completing a week living as a tramp in order to study vagrancy. The story resurfaced after a photograph of Harold Stevens sleeping on the Read More…
John Rede: Poole governor, English radical
Some 400 years after his birth, John Rede the English radical, Baptist leader and governor of Poole from 1647 to 1651, is to be afforded a proper place in history when he is included in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography to be published this autumn. ‘It’s not that Rede has Read More…
b-side, not just the seaside
Since 2008, the biennial b-side festival has sought to cast a different light on the Weymouth and Portland area, provoking double takes and scratched heads from locals and visitors alike with what festival producer Sandy Kirkby describes as its ‘quirky interventions’ on sometimes overlooked sites. Previously these have included lines of overheard speech flashed on Read More…
The Cumberland gap…
‘For many years I’ve held a brief For Bournemouth’s Golden Sands Indeed A1 in my belief Are Bournemouth’s Golden Sands You lie on your back from ten till one, And get well baked by the genial sun; And then turn over when you’re done On Bournemouth’s Golden Sands.’ As an opening salvo from Cumberland Clark’s Read More…