Check out Will Self pondering the meaning of cemetries, AONBs and the meaning of 'english heritage' in his latest blog

Will Self's latest Madness of Crowds Column ponders Death in the Suburbs and wonders whether we would not all be better buried under areas of outstanding natural beauty

Check it out at http://will-self.com/2012/01/22/death-in-the-suburbs/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=death-in-the-suburbs

New energy guide for owners of historic homes

Saving energy: a guide for owners of historic homes

An Historic Towns Forum project in conjunction with The Prince’s Regeneration Trust and fourth year UWE architecture and planning student Heidi Tremlett, has produced a useful guidance leaflet to show how historic home owners can reduce CO2 emissions in their homes. Download the leaflet here.

DCMS opens up debate on Cultural Value

What does 'cultural value' mean, and to whom?

The latest blog post from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) seeks to stimulate discussion across the cultural sector on the very idea of measuring cultural value. Dr Claire Donovan is an academic working at DCMS to write a report on this issue, and wants to know what we in the heritage sector, and those in the arts, libraries, and museums sectors, think.

Dr Donovan asks can the value of culture be measured by government in monetary (or other) terms, or is it ‘priceless’? Is ‘measure’ the right word? What is ‘culture’ anyway? What does ‘value’ mean and to whom? And how should DCMS go about deciding what to support with public money? Get involved in the discussion here.

  

Survive the Stone Age this Spring at Salisbury Museum

Surviving the Stone AgeVenue: Major Exhibition Galleries / Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 28 Jan 2012 - 12 May 2012
Time: 10:00 - 11:30 

When the climate changes from warm to freezing, the plants and animals you rely on for food and clothing die out or disappear, how would YOU survive?  Packed full of fun activities set alongside Ice Age animal bones and the oldest objects made by people found in this area, this exhibition looks at how the earliest people survived over 300,000 years ago. 
Specially suited for primary school ages or families, but with something of interest for everyone, you will be asked to think about whether you think you could have lived in a time before farming, when people survived by hunting and gathering and when extreme climate change threatened their existence.  
Plus, if you enter our cave Art Competition, you get free admission in to the exhibition if you bring your entry with you.  We will display it in the exhibition and you have chance of winning a special Behind the Scenes tour with the Museum’s Director who will even let you touch a real mammoth bone!

Landscapes of Thomas Hardy's Wessex opens tomorrow

Landscapes of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex: Works by Dave Gunning, David Inshaw and Rob Pountney

Venue: Small Exhibition Gallery / Salisbury & South Wiltshire MuseumDate: 14 Jan 2012 - 14 Apr 2012
Time: 10:00 - 11:30 

A collaboration between three artists who have depicted the dramatic landscapes and ancient archaeological sites of Hardy’s Wessex landscape.   Key works were specifically selected by the artists to show their varied and eclectic response to the places in Wiltshire that Hardy wrote about.  Ranging from compressed charcoal drawings, prints, steel etchings and oil paintings, the work of Dave Gunning, David Inshaw and Rob Pountney is displayed in the Museum’s upstairs gallery.  

By personally selecting a small number of key pieces from their huge bodies of work, these artists give a unique glimpse into their own reactions to their art.  They are showing what they consider to be their most revealing and emotional responses to a landscape they have got to know intimately, both through Hardy and through their own experience of it.

Lecture on the Saxons of Wessex in Shaftesbury

Saxons in Wessex - Tuesday 7th February 2012 - Adrian Green

Lecture organised by the Shaftesbury & District Historical Society
Venue: Anna McDowell Garden Room, Gold Hill Museum, Shaftesbury

Time: 2.30pm

Tickets: £2.50. Shaftesbury & District Historical Society members free.

Last chance to see 'Art in the Shadow of the Chase' at the Dorchester Museum...but the exhibition is moving to Salisbury in May if you miss it

'Art in the Shadow of the Chase' is a free exhibition opening at Dorset County Museum, Dorchester on the 22nd October. Focusing on artists who have been inspired by the Cranborne Chase. The exhibition runs until 21st January 2012

"Cranborne: Art in the shadow of the Chase" is a ground-breaking exhibition about the artists who over the last hundred years have found in Cranborne Chase and its hinterland a landscape of ‘bare bone’ beauty and retreat.

The paintings, drawings, sculpture and other artwork  in the exhibition have come from a variety of sources, and range from early neo-romantic work of the 1920s to contemporary work specially made for this exhibition. The list of artists is extensive and includes painters: John Craxton, members of the Nicholson family (Winifred, Ben, E.Q., Tim), Lucian Freud, Derek Hill, Augustus John, Henry Lamb, Katharine Church (Kitty West),  Frances Hodgkins, Nora, Amy and Gabriel Summers, James Allardyce, Peggy Rankin, Christopher Row, Mavis Freer, Ursula Leach, Brian Graham, John Hubbard, Paul Jones, Howard Pearce and John Hitchens. There is also sculpture by Elisabeth Frink, Peter Thursby, Ian Middleton and Ann Catherine Row; pottery by Richard Batterham, Chris Carter, Lucy Yarwood and Leonie Summers; glass by Joseph A. Nuttgens and  textile rugs by Louisa Creed and Rod Hill.

In spite of all the changes which have occurred in the last hundred years with increasing urbanisation of the countryside, the Chase has remained topographically intact. It is still a breath taking landscape, an area of outstanding beauty, sparsely populated with large estates small hamlets and villages. It remains an ‘island’, a place apart, and it is this isolation, along with its unique landscape which continues to attract artists today. Like threads of  a mycelium there continues to be  connections between places, painters and their art. Pulling together the work of artists from the recent past and some of those working today, the exhibition will affirm the special qualities of Cranborne Chase and its hinterland and demonstrate that it retains the power to inspire artistic creativity and new progressive art. 

The exhibition is to be accompanied by a richly-illustrated publication Circles and Tangents :  Art in the shadow of Cranborne Chase, _written by curator, author and artist Vivienne Light FRSA.