Culture
Sheerness' sand and shingle beach was awarded a European Blue Flag for cleanliness and safety. Flower gardens decorate the seafront, and a sea wall forms a promenade along the coast. The Sheppey Leisure Complex located near the beach contains a swimming pool and badminton, squash and tennis courts. Other sports clubs include Sheerness Town Bowls Club, Sheerness East Cricket Club, the Isle of Sheppey Sailing Club, Beachfields Skatepark, Sheerness East Table Tennis Club, Catamaran Yacht Club, and Sheerness Swimming Club and Lifeguard Corps. Sheerness Golf Club was founded in 1906, and has an 18-hole course just to the south-east of town. Sheerness East Football Club, established in 1932, play in the Kent County League Premier Division. Sports can be played for free at the town's recreation grounds at Beachfields Park, Festival Playing Field, and Seager Road Sports Ground. In 2005, 2006 & 2007 Sheppey Big Fish Arts organised Annual SeaSheppey Festivals in Blue Town and Queenborough Funded by the Heritage Lottery fund to celebrate Sheppey's unique Maritime history The annual Sheerness arts and heritage festival, Promenade, opened in September 2011 with appearances by Michael Palin and Dan Cruickshank. It is the only heritage festival on the Isle of Sheppey and takes place in September in The Sheppey Little Theatre, the Heritage Center in Blue Town and various other venues in Sheerness.
Sheerness has a library and clubs for photography, music, singing, dancing and writing.
Sheerness' town centre is home to the largest freestanding cast iron clock tower in Kent. It is 36 feet (11 m) tall and was built in 1902 at a cost of around £360 to commemorate the coronation of King Edward VII. In 2002, the clock tower was restored to celebrate the Golden Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“There has never been in history another such culture as the Western civilization M a culture which has practiced the belief that the physical and social environment of man is subject to rational manipulation and that history is subject to the will and action of man; whereas central to the traditional cultures of the rivals of Western civilization, those of Africa and Asia, is a belief that it is environment that dominates man.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)