Tag Archives: Folkestone

East Kent UK City of Culture 2017 bid

Posted on April 14, 2013 by | Comments Off

 

South East Blue Badge Tour GuidesCanterbury, Margate, Ashford and Folkestone have joined forces in a bid to be crowned Culture Capital of the UK.  The national competition is organised by the Department for Media, Culture and Sport (DCMS)  inspired by the European City of Culture contest, first won by Liverpool in 2008. The UK contest is awarded once in every four years and will bring enormous publicity and investment into the winning area including hosting some major international events such as the Man Booker Prize and the Turner Prize.

Kent County Council has confirmed it will promote the area under the slogan East Kent: A City Imagined.

 

Rivals include Chester, Plymouth, Portsmouth and Southampton, Hastings and Bexhill, Southend and Leicester.

 

Designer Wayne Hemingway has put his name behind the  bid: “East Kent is clearly finding its cultural mojo. I have come to recognise and appreciate the depth, resourcefulness, creativity, diversity and wit of the area’s cultural community – a community that is well equipped to deliver projects of international significance.”

Yeesssss!

Blue Badge tourist guide

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Elementary Kent

Posted on January 20, 2012 by | 1 Comment

Never known not to name drop when the occasion demands it, South East Tour Guides are delighted to share  our researched Kentish connections with Sherlock Holmes the original, his adventures and his current re-incarntion.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the original Sherlock Holmes stories, spent much time in Kent straying into the county from his home in Crowborough. He perhaps spent too long in the Garden of England, as once on his way home, he picked up a speeding ticket not far from Folkestone, thought to be one of the first ones ever issued. He was so incensed that he wrote a blistering letter to the Daily Mail.

Sherlock Holmes stories have been set in various parts of Kent such as Margate, and filmed in many atmospheric  parts of Kent over the years, Chatham Historic Royal Dockyard, to name just one.

Three additional Sherlock Holmes short stories are set in Canterbury. These ‘alternative Sherlock Holmes’ stories are not by Doyle but by Miles Elward;  The Missing Cleric draws inevitably on magnificent Canterbury Cathedral, Kent as well as St Martin’s Church.

The current BBC TV’s hit show Sherlock has transferred with great aplomb, the adventures of the Baker Street sleuth & his accomplice Dr John Watson to the 21st century.   The show’s creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gattis have   disclosed that it was from the work of Ashford (Kent again) author Michael Hardwick that they drew their inspiration. Hardwick created many new Sherlock Holmes adventures in the Conan Doyle style, as well as writing the novelisation of the irreverent film made by American director Billy Wilder  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock’s last episode on BBC 1 at 10pm on Sunday, stars Benedict Cumberbatch (prep school Brambletye, West Sussex – nearly Kent) as Holmes with Martin Freeman as his colleague Dr Watson.

The coming episode is entitled The Reichenbach Fall a pun on the location in Switzerland (sadly, not Kent) where the original literary Holmes had a fatal confrontation with arch enemy Professor James Moriarty.

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