THE King and Queen visited Blandford Forum on Thursday 16th July, to see the newly restored Corn Exchange and meet representatives of various cultural and charity groups, including Dorset Opera Festival and Poole’s Lighthouse arts centre. The Lighthouse team, led by chief executive Elspeth McBain and creative engagement manager Martha Earley, were among representatives of…
FOR the first time in 30 years, there has been a confirmed sighting of a puffling on the vertiginous Purbeck cliffs. The news of the puffin fledgling gives hope for Dorset’s dwindling puffin colony, says the National Trust, which manages the Dancing Ledge area. The sighting follows monitoring by 13 volunteers who spent 150 hours…
YOU know what they say – if you remember the 60s, you weren’t really there. It is probably also true that if you remember the 50s, you wouldn’t want to go back there. But romantic Judy and her husband Johnny love the 50s. They love the music, the clothes, the home decor … Johnny obviously…
YEOVIL’s young star choreographer James Bamford has a busy few weeks – at the end of July he will be working with the Covent Garden Dance Company at the schools day at the Walled Garden at Hatch near Tisbury, and on 27th and 28th August he brings his own Project Dance Company back to Westlands…
SHAFTESBURY independent bookshop The Kitchen Table, which specialises exclusively in food writing, has been named the official bookshop partner for the British Library’s Food Season, which runs to 2nd July and is one of the UK’s leading festivals dedicated to food, culture and storytelling, now in its eighth year. Approached directly by the British Library,…
THE north east of England has for many years (centuries, if you include the Border Ballads) been a hotbed of folk music – home to the Waterson-Carthy dynasty, Fay Hield, Kathryn Tickell, The Unthanks, Lindisfarne … The list also includes Rachael McShane, an original member of folk big band Bellowhead, who travelled from Newcastle on…
ANDY Morton, the director of this year’s Dorset Opera Festival production of L’Elisir d’Amore, was born and brought up in Sherborne, where his father was a teacher. It was as a teenager at Sherborne School he first came into contact with opera, joining the chorus of Dorset Opera then run by Patrick Shelley. After studies,…
SHAKESPEARE in the open air is a summer tradition, and this year the memory of sitting in the rain and cold seems like a thing of the past. It was a welcome relief as the cooling breeze wafted across the front of Muchelney’s ancient abbey, following the adventures of storm-separated identical twins Viola and Sebastian….
THE multi-talented actor, artist, playwright and adaptor Clive Francis has turned his pen to Graham Green’s comic novel Our Man in Havana to create a fast and furious visit to the Caribbean where the world’s most unlikely spy is recruited to help the British intelligence service in the time following the second world war and…
The Dorset-based monochrome collective of photographers has an exhibition in the Borough Gardens rooms in Dorchester in September, following the success of last year’s inaugural show of black and white images by artists and photographers including the distinguished portrait and still life painter Michael Taylor.