Culture
- Architecture
The town is famous for its Regency architecture and is said to be "the most complete regency town in England". Many of the buildings are listed, including the Cheltenham Synagogue, judged by Nikolaus Pevsner to be one of the architecturally "best" non-Anglican ecclesiastical buildings in Britain.
- History
The Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum has a notable collection of decorative arts from the era of the Arts and Crafts Movement. The Holst Birthplace Museum contains personal belongings of the composer of The Planets, including his piano. It also includes a working Victorian kitchen and laundry, Regency drawing room and an Edwardian nursery.
The Cheltenham Civic Society has been responsible for erecting commemorative plaques in the town since 1982: blue plaques to celebrate well-known people and green plaques to celebrate significant places and events.
- Festivals
Every year, Cheltenham Festivals organises music, jazz, literature and science festivals in the town, attracting names with national and international reputations in each field. Events take place at venues including the Town Hall, the Everyman Theatre, The Playhouse Theatre and the Pittville Pump Room.
Several other cultural festivals, including the Cheltenham Folk Festival, Cheltenham Film Festival, Cheltenham Poetry Festival and Cheltenham Comedy Festival are separately organised but also attract international performers. A more local event, the Cheltenham Festival of the Performing Arts (formerly Cheltenham Competitive Festival) is a collection of more than 300 performance competitions that is the oldest of Cheltenham's arts festivals, having been started in 1926.
Greenbelt, a Christian arts and music festival, and Wychwood Festival, a family-friendly folk and world music festival, are held at Cheltenham Racecourse. The town also hosts the multi-venue Walk the line festival.
Two sporting events are also routinely described as the "Cheltenham Festival" or ""the Festival": the Cheltenham Cricket Festival, which features Gloucestershire County Cricket Club, and National Hunt racing's Cheltenham Festival.
In 2010, Cheltenham was named the UK's fifth ""most musical" City by PRS for Music.
- Film and television
Cheltenham has played host to and featured in a number of film and TV series:
- Butterflies was predominantly filmed in Cheltenham.
- "If.... (1968) was filmed in Cheltenham.
- The Whistle Blower, a spy thriller, was largely filmed in Cheltenham, as GCHQ is central to the plot.
- The Full Monteverdi, a 2007 British film written and directed by John La Bouchardière, was partly filmed in Cheltenham.
- The House of Eliott, a British television series produced and broadcast by the BBC between 1991 and 1994, was partly filmed in Cheltenham.
- Vanity Fair (1998 TV serial), a BBC serialised adaptation of William Makepeace Thackery's novel of the same name, was partly filmed in Cheltenham.
- Theatre
Cheltenham has three theatres: the Everyman, the Playhouse and the Bacon.
Read more about this topic: St. Edward's Junior School
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“One of the oddest features of western Christianized culture is its ready acceptance of the myth of the stable family and the happy marriage. We have been taught to accept the myth not as an heroic ideal, something good, brave, and nearly impossible to fulfil, but as the very fibre of normal life. Given most families and most marriages, the belief seems admirable but foolhardy.”
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“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)