Culture
Guildford has the most visited Art Gallery in Surrey, Guildford House Gallery, with over 120,000 visitors per annum, situated in the High Street, in a 17th century Grade I Listed Town House and is run by Guildford Borough Council. Its own art collection includes works of Guildford and the surrounding area, and work by Guildford Artists, most notably John Russell R.A. Also run by the borough Council is Guildford Museum housing archaeology, local history and needlework displays. Smaller private fine art galleries share the High Street with the art gallery.
The town's principal commercial theatre is the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre which sometimes shows productions before and frequently after they have spent time in London's West End. The Electric Theatre opened in 1997 to host performances by musicians and amateur drama groups. It also hosts regular film, family and music festivals as well as comedy and has a Riverside Cafe Bar and Terrace. The boileroom hosts new and established folk, pop and rock acts.
Guildford also has an Odeon cinema multiplex, which is as of June 2007 the only cinema in the world showing digital 4K films to the public . Guildford Civic Hall was the town's main arts and entertainment venue. It closed in January 2004 and has been replaced by a new live entertainment and conference venue, G Live, which opened in September 2011. G Live is operated by HQ Theatres Limited on behalf of Guildford Borough Council. In 2009 the Mill Studio in Guildford featured the English premiere of the one-woman musical, Estelle Bright, starring actress/singer Sarah Tullamore.
The Guildford Philharmonic Orchestra, founded as the Guildford Municipal Orchestra, received full council funding from 1945 until it was withdrawn in 2012. The orchestra will disband in Spring 2013. The opportunity to run the council's classical music service with reduced funding from the council is currently being put out to tender.
Stoke Park, the largest park, is the venue for both the Guilfest music festival during the summer and the Surrey County Show - agricultural and general - on the last bank holiday Monday in May. Previous to 2007, the Ambient Picnic was held in Shalford Park, by the River Wey.
Radio stations, Kane 103.7 FM, 96.4 The Eagle, County Sound Radio (1566 AM), GU2 Radio, and BBC Surrey are based in Guildford.
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Famous quotes containing the word culture:
“Culture is the suggestion, from certain best thoughts, that a man has a range of affinities through which he can modulate the violence of any master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor him against himself. Culture redresses this imbalance, puts him among equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I am writing to resist the view that Europe and civilization are going to Hell. If I am being “crucified for an idea”Mthat is, the coherent idea around which my muddles accumulated—it is probably the idea that European culture ought to survive, that the best qualities of it ought to survive along with whatever cultures, in whatever universality. Against the propaganda of terror and the propaganda of luxury, have you a nice simple answer?”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“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)