Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2018 i Discover Britain

For natural engineering feats… Durdle Door Lulworth, Dorset According to the Jurassic Coast Trust, the independent charity that manages the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site, Durdle Door was formed as a result of the same geological process that gave us the Alps. It is thought that when the African and European tectonic plates collided some 25 million years ago, the pressures not only created the central European mountain range but also rippled outwards to form more gentle rifts along the British coast. The frame of the Door is a hard limestone layer rising up from the English Channel between the resort towns of Swanage and Weymouth. Less resilient rock at the centre was eroded to create this most unlikely natural aperture at the end of Durdle Cove’s sweep of sand-and-shingle…

Martin Parr Photographer I was recently asked to photograph beaches in Essex. The National Maritime Museum wanted pictures for its new The Great British Seaside exhibition. It was exciting to discover and document all these different communities using beaches at Clacton and Southend. The British seaside is utterly charming. I guess we have a lot of it because we are completely surrounded by water. It’s slightly fraying at the edges, which is appealing as a photographer. It doesn’t feel homogenised like Disneyland. Even being at the seaside in the rain has a certain appeal – it’s a very British thing to do. In 2017, I opened the Martin Parr Foundation in Bristol. I’ve lived there for 25 years and it’s a great city, very independent and near to nice countryside.…

All art is subjective, yet there is no denying that a little competition has brought out the best in some of the world’s greatest creative talents. In 1768, King George III founded the Royal Academy of Arts, but what began life as a place for the promotion, exhibition and education of art in Britain very soon became a gladiatorial arena in which our finest artists were metaphorically duelling with paintbrushes. Over the past 250 years, the roll call of Royal Academicians reads like a who’s who of art in Britain, from Thomas Gainsborough and John Singer Sargent to David Hockney and Tracey Emin. The Royal Academy of Arts was born out of the ashes of another organisation, the Incorporated Society of Artists of Great Britain, which was granted a Royal…

DEVON On 20 July 1588, when the first sightings of the invading Spanish Armada were brought to Sir Francis Drake, the second-in-command to the English fleet famously continued with his game of bowls on Plymouth Hoe. The Devon-born vice admiral was perhaps aware of adverse weather conditions, and defeated the Spaniards when he eventually launched the fleet anyway, yet his unflustered response set the tone for the county as a whole. Locals have a similarly relaxed outlook – provided, of course, you don’t ask them to debate their preferred scone etiquette with their neighbours in Cornwall (for the record, the Devonian way is cream first, then jam, not vice versa). For the casual visitor, Devon can be broadly thought of in three distinct sections. The first is the rugged beauty…

Shedding new light I am an 80-year-old widow who has lived in Australia for 23 years so it was lovely to read an item on Bisley [The Quiet Life, Issue 201], the village I emigrated from. The text about the hexagonal pedestal in the church [above] gave a slightly different account from the story told by my mother. She came from the neighbouring village of Chalford Hill and told me that in the Middle Ages, a young clergyman was appointed vicar of Bisley by the Pope. The pedestal was supposed to light the way through the churchyard so that strangers would not fall into the adjacent well. Someone forgot to light the candle, however, and the new vicar fell in and drowned. The Pope duly punished Bisley diocese, including making…

Fifty years ago, nine intrepid men competed in the first solo non-stop sailing race around the world. One by one they dropped out. Donald Crowhurst, the subject of the recently released film The Mercy (in which he is played by Colin Firth), having fooled everyone with transmissions of fake position reports, apparently drowned himself. Frenchman Bernard Moitessier, rather than return to Europe and possible victory, simply kept on sailing “to save my soul”. Other competitors sank or retired. Only Englishman Robin Knox-Johnston, aboard the yacht Suhaili, completed the gruelling round-the-world challenge via the five great capes. After 312 days at sea, Knox-Johnston arrived back in Falmouth, Cornwall, on 22 April 1969 to a hero’s welcome, a trophy and a £5,000 prize (he later donated the money to a fund supporting…

The film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 1960s-set novel On Chesil Beach opens this month and – as revealed over the last five pages – it will draw attention to stunning stretch of English coastline. To celebrate the film’s release, Discover Britain has teamed up with Lionsgate, Vintage and The Manor House to create a fantastic competition prize. Enter below for your chance to win a luxury break in Dorset, complete with a stay in a 16th-century manor with rooms overlooking Chesil Beach. On top of that, our winner will be invited to dine with a guest in the hotel restaurant as well as taking home a copy of the novel and a limited edition Art Deco-style print that is unavailable to buy anywhere in the shops. The Prize One lucky…

The British Museum by James Hamilton Today London’s British Museum is the 10th most visited museum in the world, yet it began life in 1759 as the collection of just three men: Sir Hans Sloane, Sir Robert Cotton and Edward Harley, the 2nd Earl of Oxford. Historian James Hamilton charts the intervening 250 years with vigour, documenting Victorian power struggles and contemporary approaches to collecting in a respectful yet questioning way. (Head of Zeus, £18.99) Urban Rambles by Nicholas Rudd-Jones A nice long walk doesn’t just mean heading for the countryside. Twenty city circuits are presented in depth here, from a medieval trail in Lincoln to four separate trips in central London. Slotted among the walks come handy little primers on everything from Victorian industry to…

CHANGING ROOMS What did early wallpaper look like? Experts renovating the interiors of Lindisfarne Castle on the Northumberland coast might have found the answer, after uncovering stylish flower motifs from the 17th century in the kitchen. It had been thought that the castle was solely used by soldiers guarding the Anglo-Scottish border before architect Sir Edwin Lutyens converted it into a holiday retreat for Country Life magazine founder Edward Hudson in 1903. The ‘wallpaper’, drawn in charcoal with areas of red pigment, suggests the castle might have had another use in its early days, too. The mystery deepens. Sections of the wall paintings will be on show when the castle reopens this spring after its £3 million renovation. www.nationaltrust.org.uk/lindisfarne-castle LIFE THROUGH A LENS Lee Miller was one of the most…

The north Wales coast is a place of subtle pleasures. It may lack the dramatic peaks and ancient castles of the Snowdonia National Park to the west, and the urban buzz of Liverpool to the east, yet the 25-mile stretch between the estuaries of the rivers Conwy and Dee is dotted with fascinating heritage sites aligned on a perfect tourist trail – a golden thread that, with a little unpicking, reveals much about this under-appreciated corner of the world. The trail begins in Llandudno, a town that esteemed travel writer Bill Bryson named “my favourite of all seaside resorts” and remains the largest of its kind in Wales. Best viewed from Llandudno Bay beach, the sweep of grand Victorian houses and hotels along the promenade are painted in various jolly,…

Other nautical exhibitions around Britain in 2018 As Wales celebrates its Year of the Sea in 2018, Swansea’s National Waterfront Museum presents the swashbuckling – and free – Pirates: The Truth Behind the Tales (until 30 September). museum.wales/swansea Chart a course to London’s British Library for James Cook: The Voyages (until 28 August) to see objects collected on his travels, including decorated paddles, feather god heads and drawings made by his Polynesian navigator Tupaia. www.bl.uk View from the Deck: Sue Jane Taylor (until 28 October) compiles 30 years of drawings about Scotland’s offshore industries at the Aberdeen Maritime Museum. Her sketchy style delivers acute observations. www.aagm.co.uk From conspiracy theories to migration tales, Titanic Stories (until 7 January 2019) explores our enduring interest in the doomed British ship at the National…

An English beach on a grey summer’s afternoon. There’s a stillness in the air, broken only by the waves that peter out as they try and fail to scale the steep banks of shingle. A wedge of swans flies low over the shallow Fleet Lagoon, while cows graze idly by the water’s edge. Soundtracked by Sil Austin’s bluesy, sax-driven Slow Walk, the opening scenes to the new film adaptation of Ian McEwan’s novella On Chesil Beach are supremely evocative of this particular corner of Dorset coastline. On Chesil Beach is a rather revealing story for several reasons. Set in July 1962, before Beatlemania and the teenage revolution, it hones in on an almost comically repressed – and particularly English – attitude towards sex in the post-war era. The plot centres…

HISTORY IN BLOOM The Royal Horticultural Society’s annual flower show at Hampton Court Palace is the world’s largest event of its kind, with more than 140,000 people visiting the 34-acre site every year. The floral marquee alone is big enough to house an entire football pitch. First staged in 1990, this year’s 29th festival will feature several new strands among the regular mix of marquees, pavilions and gardens. An ‘Iconic Horticultural Heroes’ section will celebrate the work of Dutch garden designer Piet Oudolf via a walkthrough filled with his trademark herbaceous perennials, while ‘Evolve: Through the Roots of Time’ digs back across 500 million years of greenery to the lush jungles of the Jurassic period. RHS Hampton Court Palace Flower Show 2018 runs from 2-8 July at Hampton Court Palace.…

Shortly after the Second World War, Minister of Health Aneurin Bevan, proposed ambitious reforms giving all UK residents access to comprehensive healthcare, free at the point of delivery. Despite post-war austerity, the National Health Service (NHS) came into being on 5 July 1948. For the past 70 years this treasured institution has continued along these principles. The NHS is part of Britain’s long history of healthcare innovation, part of which can be uncovered at any of the 26 museums and gardens dedicated to health and medicine in London. This may seem a surprising number, until you consider that, in the capital alone, there are currently seven medical schools, 14 teaching hospitals and 11 Medical Royal Colleges. Just five minutes’ walk from St Paul’s Cathedral, St Bartholomew’s Hospital Museum tells the…

The Royal British Legion was quick to adopt the poppy and sold them on Armistice Day The First World War ended on 11 November 1918. Much of the fighting had taken place in Western Europe, ravaging otherwise picturesque countryside. One of the few flowers to thrive in this environment was the red Flanders poppy, native to its namesake part of northern Belgium. It was the Canadian military surgeon Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae who observed the symbolism of the poppy when he penned In Flanders Fields as a tribute to a friend lost in the Second Battle of Ypres. The poem begins “In Flanders’ fields the poppies blow/Between the crosses, row on row”, drawing a graceful parallel between the resilient flowers and the individual memorials to lost men. McCrae’s poem in…