Beckenham - Culture and Leisure

Culture and Leisure

There is a museum and archives at Bethlem Royal Hospital. The local Odeon cinema has six screens and is a grade II listed building. In common with most towns of its size, Beckenham has a number of leisure organisations and societies; whilst the Beckenham Festival of Music and Dancing takes place every November. Beckenham Theatre exists to put on amateur productions. The Beckenham Concert Band is a successful community wind band which has, over the last 35 years, raised thousands of pounds for local and national charities. It caters for amateur wind and brass musicians and performs locally during the winter months and across London and the South East during the summer.

The South East London Green Chain, a long-distance footpath is well represented in Beckenham. Both Kelsey Park and Beckenham Place Park form part of the Chain. There are other open spaces in the town, including Croydon Road Recreation Ground and Cator Park. South Norwood Country Park abuts the town to the south-west. There is also a walk starting in Cator Park, going down the High Street, through Kelsey Park, then Croydon Road Recreation Ground and back to Cator Park.

Read more about this topic:  Beckenham

Famous quotes containing the words culture and, culture and/or leisure:

    Whatever offices of life are performed by women of culture and refinement are thenceforth elevated; they cease to be mere servile toils, and become expressions of the ideas of superior beings.
    Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896)

    The white dominant culture seemed to think that once the Indians were off the reservations, they’d eventually become like everybody else. But they aren’t like everybody else. When the Indianness is drummed out of them, they are turned into hopeless drunks on skid row.
    Elizabeth Morris (b. c. 1933)

    ... in the fierce competition of modern society the only class left in the country possessing leisure is that of women supported in easy circumstances by husband or father, and it is to this class we must look for the maintenance of cultivated and refined tastes, for that value and pursuit of knowledge and of art for their own sakes which can alone save society from degenerating into a huge machine for making money, and gratifying the love of sensual luxury.
    Mrs. H. O. Ward (1824–1899)