Culture
Local author and poet Thomas Hardy based the fictional town of Casterbridge on Dorchester. Hardy's childhood home is to the east of the town, and his house in town, Max Gate, is owned by the National Trust and open to the public. William Barnes, the local dialect poet, was Rector of Winterborne Came, a small hamlet near Dorchester, for 24 years until his death in 1886, and ran a school in the town. Statues of both men stand in the town centre; Barnes is outside St Peter's Church and Hardy's beside the Top o' Town crossroads. Cecil Day Lewis is buried in Stinsford, one mile (1.6 km) from Dorchester. Hardy is buried in London, but his heart was removed and buried in Stinsford.
On the hills to the south west of the town, stands Hardy's Monument, a memorial to the other local Thomas Hardy, Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy, who served with Lord Nelson, which overlooks the town with views of Weymouth, the Isle of Portland and Chesil Beach. Tom Roberts, Australian painter, was born in Dorchester in 1856.
Dorchester Arts, a regularly funded arts organisation based in a former school building runs a seasonal programme of music, dance and theatre events in the town as well as a range of participatory arts projects for socially excluded groups and the biannual Dorchester Festival. In 2011, Dorchester Arts became an Arts Council 'National Portfolio organisation' with enhanced funding until 2015.
Museums in Dorchester include the Roman Town House, The Dinosaur Museum, the Terracotta Warriors Museum, the Dorset Teddy Bear Museum, The Keep Military Museum, Dorset County Museum. and the Tutankhamun Exhibition. All of these museums took part in the "Museums at Night" event in May 2011 where museums across the UK opened after hours.
On 15 December 2004, Dorchester was granted Fairtrade Town status.
Read more about this topic: St Osmund's Church Of England Middle School
Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Our culture is ill-equipped to assert the bourgeois values which would be the salvation of the under-class, because we have lost those values ourselves.”
—Norman Podhoretz (b. 1930)
“There is something terribly wrong with a culture inebriated by noise and gregariousness.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)