But I am so incensed after returning from a public meeting about street lighting in Dorset. No. I’m more than incensed. I’m bloody incandescent.

How can it be, in these days of so-called people power, with the Localism Bill just round the corner, that Dorset is under the threat of being changed for ever by an all-embracing street lighting scheme?

I am almost speechless. But not quite:

Oh my.

Dorset is going to be bathed in swathes of light. The spotlight is literally turning on Hardy’s Dorset, rural Dorset, that bucolic bubble of beauty, my enchanted village and villages everywhere.

Those nice people at Dorset County Council are going to improve our street lighting.

Rural Dorset, embrace your inner urban child. The street lights roadshow is coming to town…and villages and hamlets to a street, lane or cul-de-sac near you.

Here’s a leaflet about it:

Is that Canary Wharf I see in the distance? Or is it Hong Kong? It isn’t Lush Places, that’s for sure. Our dear Lush Places, with its village pump, the green, the red phone box and historic buildings all around.

But it could be soon, believe me it. It could be lots of lovely places all over this hidden gem of a county. Those quiet, secret corners of Dorset suddenly exposed for all to see.

Because the county council has entered into a private finance initiative (PFI) pact – not with the devil (it ditched energy company EDF a little while ago in a veil of silence) – but with those nice people from SSE [SSE Energy Supply Limited, a member of the Scottish and Southern Energy Group].  They’re much more softly spoken and far more approachable. They even look human but the story is the just same.

In the next few years, light pollution is going to be reduced across Dorset. That’s in the sky. But not in our rural areas. The soft, orange glow is going to be replaced by bright, white light, to meet the British and European standard.

Hurrah. One size fits all.

My village square has already been floodlit by stealth, under the heading ‘we’re going to give you traffic calming but we’re not going to tell you about the extra street lights you’ll need’. Until, whoosh, the Lush Places square looks like a Premier League football match at midnight.

The county council, when challenged, said ‘oops, sorry, we forgot to let you know about that bit’ and pledged to learn from its mistake and make sure the public was consulted on lighting schemes in the future.

So, a couple of years later, their contractor put a few posters up on telegraph poles, inviting people to a public meeting.

A few people turned up (what does it matter, it’s nothing to do with me. Oh, but it is, it really is).

‘This is consulation,’ the contractors said. ‘We’re going to give eight roads in your village new lights.’

‘Thank you so much,’ we said (ironically). ‘We live in the countryside but we really want it to be like a big town.’

‘That’s good,’ they said. ‘Because we’re doing it in a month’s time.’

So watch out, the new lights are coming to a lamp post near you.

And 28,000 other lamp posts across Dorset. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

THE PATROL Officers for St Mary’s Primary School in Beaminster look a bit young these days don’t they? That’s because these children no longer have a lollipop lady (as you and I call them). Why? Because when the last lollipop lady resigned, Dorset County Council decided not to replace her.  

Much money was spent by the government to encourage us to walk to school. Great. But in these days of cutbacks children need to meet the National Criteria to cross the road to school safely. There is a formula that tells council officers if pupils deserve a safe crossing or not. Council Terms: “the site needs to meet the National Criteria”. St Mary’s is below the required criteria. The numbers don’t add up. Where and how this formula has been devised I do not know but it is very unlikely to have been brainstormed in rural England. 

On 2 September 2010, just before 9am, the first day back at school, 36 children under ten years old crossed the road, 14 on their own. In the meanwhile, 162 cars drove along Clay Lane. In case you don’t know Clay Lane, it’s a lane only by name. It is in fact a large B road into Beaminster with a busy shop opposite the school where shoppers are keen to park as close to the door as possible.  

What struck me was that the Road Safety Officer at Dorset County Council came on the first day of school to ‘carry out a site survey’ and determine whether there are enough kids crossing the road. Don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t call the first day back at school a typical kind of day, especially for a Primary School. I took my child to school that day. Otherwise I don’t. I wonder if they’ll be waiting for Met Office weather warnings for the next site survey. 

Generally speaking, councils aren’t renowned for speedy decisions but on this occasion, they surveyed, wrote a letter to St Mary’s school and took the funding away all on the same day. Good to see efficiency can be achieved. 

Let’s talk money now. A lollipop lady’s wage is in the region of £3,200 per year. New council offices cost millions. Where would you rather your local taxes went?

Dorset County Council’s response

Editor’s Note: I asked Dorset County Council for a comment on Monday and here one is, from road safety officer Alan Proctor.

Funding

Firstly, the headline “No money for primary school lollipop lady” is factually incorrect. The issue here is not about funding. It is about meeting nationally agreed criteria to ensure that the highest risk sites are given priority. Had the site met the national criteria, Dorset County Council would have recruited a new patrol in line with current council policy.

National guidelines

The national guidelines adopted by the county council, as approved by the elected members, were produced by a working group from the Local Authority Road Safety Officers Association (LARSOA), now Road Safety GB, in 2008, replacing the previous version produced in 2003.

The guidelines state that crossing sites should be assessed using a formula of the number of children crossing, multiplied by the number of vehicles passing the site in the busiest 30 minutes, squared.

For a site to have a patrol this figure must be at least 4 million. If a site doesn’t reach this figure, there is a lower figure at which the council can apply a multiplier, which adds a safety “weighting”.

Survey results

Following the resignation of the patrol over the summer holiday, I carried out the survey on Thursday 2 September, the first day of term, to ascertain if the site met the criteria. I was aware from a previous informal survey I had done that the site probably wouldn’t meet the criteria. The count on the day was 944,784, a long way short of 4 million and not even enough to add a multiplier. Even if I could have added factors, the absolute maximum multiplier I could have applied was 2.594, which would still only result in a total of 2.46 million, still well short of the criteria figure.

Beaminster Town Council could pay

The county council has a policy in place where the option to fund a site that doesn’t meet the criteria is offered to the town or parish council. Two sites are currently funded by town and parish councils, in Swanage and Upton. We copied our letter to the head teacher to the town council. We will be happy to discuss any possible alternative options with both the school and the town council. 

On the money

Editor’s Note: I’ve left the headline unchanged for two reasons. Firstly, so as to give Dorset County Council the chance to be critical of it. Fair’s fair.

It’s clear from Mr Proctor’s explanation that there is a formula to be followed and he has followed it.

But what’s not so clear is why, in that case, there was money for a lollipop lady before. Was that funding a mistake? If the previous post holder hadn’t resigned, would Dorset County Council have got rid of her? Whether it was a mistake, or whether it wasn’t, it seems to me that there was money flowing into a Beaminster service before - and now there isn’t. Which is the second reason why I’ve left the headline unchanged – for now.

Time to ask Dorset County Council more questions!

More questions answered and raised

I put more questions to Dorset County Council, and a spokesman said that the council was obliged to re-survey sites when a patrol retired or resigned. That’s what happened in Beaminster.

St Mary’s Primary School only had a lollilop lady in the first place because she was, in the jargon, “historic” – in other words, she began before the new criteria came into force.

Moving away now from what the county council spokesman said, she was a survivor from a more generous age.

Anyway, it would seem to be the case that the rules depriving St Mary’s came into force under a Labour government and the county council had no choice but to implement them.

Will Beaminster Town Council now pay instead?

It seems extremely unlikely that the Coalition Government will change the rules.

Will people have to band together and volunteer in a “Big Society” way? But then who would pay for the CRB checks?

Re-phrase it less politically (perhaps – when you’ve mulled over these things for a while, every word becomes charged): Will parents and children have to help each other cross the road?

It’s a way of exploring the county which can leave you feeling like the cider drinkers described by John Symonds (born 1871) of Whitchurch Canonicorum: “They did soon get off on their head.”

Some parts of the county are noticeably ruddier and more intoxicating than others.

Broadwindsor boasts more than 50 pieces recorded by the Lancashire-based folk song collectors Nick and Mally Dow. Performers include ‘Flash’ Phelps, Doug Phillips, Norman House and Dick Corbett.

The late Mr Corbett used to be landlord of The White Lion in Broadwindsor. His ashes (I’m told by Maddie Grigg) are scattered on Lewesdon Hill.

Lewesdon Hill. Photograph copyright Ray Beer, reused under Creative Commons Licence.

On the British Library’s map for Traditional Music, you can hear him sing round about 30 songs in what the notes correctly identify as a “Lively pub atmosphere.”

This means you hear comments such as “Now sing Thrashing Machine… I don’t know the bloody words” – but then off it goes

“I ad er by night and I ad er by day / I ups and I shows her the West Dorset way”

Beaminster boasts even more recordings, from Fred Chubb, Mrs Fowler, Beaminster Band member Bill House and his son Norman, a retired forestry worker and resident of Newtown. Among the rarer songs performed by Norman House is the true and scary Murder at North Perrott.

Other places and people featured include Weymouth (Ivy Sims), Dorchester (Henry Barter and George Hirst), Charminster (Norman Grey – singing Cock-a-doodle-doo in the front of his Ford Anglia in a pub car park), Stratton (Lewis Downton) and Piddletrenthide (Bill Hunt).

I don’t trouble what nobody say

Portesham crops up under Accents and Dialects. Sid Hodder (born 1878) talks about traditional stacking and threshing techniques and he also gives his views on other aspects of farming to his interviewer back in 1956, a man called Stanley Ellis.

Stanley: And what about root crops? Did you grow root crops?

Sid: You always, yes, you always growed root crops. If you don’t grow root cops, crops, you can’t get, you can’t get no food for sheep, you see. Yeah, and if you, if you don’t, if you don’t have sheep on the land, you can’t grow good corn.

Stanley: Mmm.

Sid: I don’t trouble what nobody say. Sheep is the place for the farm and that’s what the farms, that’s what the land is missing now, is sheep.

Stanley: Mmm.

Time is like a mighty river

Mmm, indeed.

I found myself wondering about other people whose voices we can now only imagine, and one example in particular, which shows how dependent upon chance and time is the survival of what comes down to us.

There was once a man called Jimmy Staple, who lived in Stoke Abbott and liked ferreting and cider.

He’s featured in Frederick Swaffield’s Narrative of Life in Stoke Abbott between 1895 and 1924. Fred was the second oldest of 12 children, born in Bridport in 1888, where his father worked at Palmers Brewery. Near the turn of the century the Swaffields moved to Stoke Abbott to take over the New Inn. Fred left school at 12 and worked in farming but then, because of the decline in agriculture, he went to work in the quarries on Portland. He returned to Stoke Abbott before he died in 1963 and he wrote down his memories in pencil in a school exercise book. That’s how we know about Jimmy Staple.

“When Jim was asked to sing in the pubs, he always sang an old song I have only heard him sing.

In this world I gained my knowledge

And for what I had to pay

Although I never went to colledge

Yet I heard the poet say

Time is like a mighty river

Rolling on from day to day

Men are vessels launched upon it

Sometimes wrecked on east away

So do your best for one another

Making life a pleasant dream

Help a worn and weary brother

Pulling hard against the stream.

“Poor Jimmy had a cancer on his lip, which caused his death.”

The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest is meant to encourage the return of a kind of experimental and eco-friendly craftsmanship.

The first graduate students on the Association’s new Design and Make course will arrive this autumn – and West Dorset will then be able to boast Britain’s first campus devoted to alternative uses for wood.

As was first reported on Real West Dorset earlier this year, the Architectural Association has been given outline planning consent for staff and students to design and put up more than a dozen new buildings in the 350 acres of Hooke Park.

The forest already has several unique buildings from the 1980s and the 1990s, when it was controlled by the Beaminster furniture maker and designer John Makepeace; others have been constructed this century by visiting AA students.

There is nowhere else quite like it.

The Hooke Park Workshop, by Richard Burton of ABK and Frei Otto, with the engineers Buro Happold. The building uses spruce thinnings from Hooke Forest to form a compression grid-shell structure. Completed in 1989. Two of the three bays of the roof accommodate a large fully equipped timber workshop, the third contains an office-studio with computing facilities and a small library. Photograph by Valerie Bennett.

A Separate Place. A hanging retreat in Hooke Forest built in 2007 during a month-long summer workshop by a student group led by Jesse Randzio. Photo by Jesse Randzio.

The AA is the world’s most renowned and influential school of architecture, set up 162 years ago.

The Hooke Park vision is – and I quote – “to combine the global experience and talent of the world’s most international architectural school with that of local craftspeople, whose wood-working, building, boat-making and other skills [will help] to create a unique new setting for architectural education.” 

It will be hands-on, back to nature.

In other words, as the editorial puts it in the new issue of Crafts magazine, “it aims to re-introduce craft skills into practice… Do we detect a backlash against the computer-led funny-shapism which has dominated the [architectural] profession for the last 15 years.”

Hooke is supposed to reflect the idea that if you’ve physically put something together yourself, you’ll better understand why buildings stand up or fall down.

Hence, perhaps, the Wakeford Bequest, given by the family of Norah Garlick in the name of Norah’s parents, Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford. Horace Wakeford’s building firm was a favourite of Sir Edwin Lutyens. The company continues today as Stepnell Ltd, which has an office in Poole.

Brett Steele, Director of the AA School of Architecture, said in a statement: “We are enormously grateful to Norah Garlick and her family, who share our vision of a woodland campus dedicated to fostering a re-connection between hand-on design and construction cultures as a path forward towards new ways of thinking, working and building.

“The Horace and Ellen Hannah Wakeford Bequest is an unprecedented commitment to not only the AA, for which we are deeply appreciative, but also demonstrates great optimism in our open experimentation with not only new kinds of architecture, but as well, new forms of teaching and learning.”

The Crossings Project, completed in 2007. An experimental footbridge within Hooke Forest. An AA student-built project led by Valentin Bontjes van Beek and Nathalie Rozencwajg. Photograph by Martin Self.

A FILM about the renowned furniture maker John Makepeace has been produced to celebrate his 50 years at the forefront of British design.

Mr Makepeace began his career in Dorset in 1957. He spent two years as an apprentice to a former-solicitor-turned-furniture-maker called Keith Cooper. He rented a room in a council house, worked extremely hard, and won first prize for a drawing desk in a Dorset Art and Craft competition.

Then he went to train as a handicraft teacher in inner-city Birmingham. Having qualified, in the summer of 1961 he toured America, which taught him, he once said, that “anything is possible…”

1976: John Makepeace moved back to Dorset, to Parnham House, the Grade I Listed Tudor mansion just outside Beaminster. He set up a School for Craftsmen in Wood that charged higher fees than Eton, and turned out a series of internationally successful designers and makers. (The best known in Dorset now is probably Guy Mallinson, with his Monty-Don-BBC-Mastercrafts featured Woodland Workshops over at Holditch).

John Makepeace

From bedsit to stately home in a decade and a half: it seems that anything was indeed possible.

How, and why? To answer those questions is in part the aim of the new film beautifully shot and edited by international documentary maker Robert Golden, who’s based in Dottery near Bridport.

Mr Golden has not sought to tell a straightforward chronological story, though there is a strong historical narrative runing through the section about the college set up at Hooke Park near Beaminster, and the extraordinary buildings created there.

In some ways it’s a shame that some of the unusual details of Mr Makepeace’s life get left out; I’ve always rather liked the fact that, when he won a kitchen design competition organised by The Observer back in the 1960s, he spent the money on a trip to Nigeria to study the architectural uses of mud.

But Mr Golden’s focus is on personal forces and ideas. The 26-minute film is called Essays in Wood and it reveals Mr Makepeace’s dedication to his vocation and his delight in things well-made.

“Craftsmen love being able to excel,” he says.

Trine chair by John Makepeace

Essays in Wood accompanies a solo exhibition of Mr Makepeace’s work organised by the Devon Guild of Craftsmen.

The exhibition – called John Makepeace: Enriching the Language of Furniture – includes 25 pieces from public and private collections in the UK and abroad, some not previously seen by the public.

The show opens in September at The Devon Guild’s centre at Bovey Tracey, then goes on a national tour.

Visitors will be able to see a 21-minute version of Essays in Wood. The full length version, with 38 minutes of extras, will only be available to buy.

The whole film is fascinating to watch – but for now, there is the trailer above.

By excellent, I mean almost gratuitously obsessed with quality, and with the means and the skill to produce superb results.

The first individuals that came to mind were the West Bexington chilli growers Michael and Joy Michaud, the Beaminster furniture maker John Makepeace, the Bridport tiler Tony Bird of ASB Tiling, the West Milton cider maker Nick Poole, and the Netherbury wildlife photographer Colin Varndell.

Then I got distracted, and forgot all about it, until Dorset Wildlife Trust sent me some images from their new 2011 calendar, all given by Colin Varndell, and all – you guessed it – excellent. Really tremendous. See:

Dormouse, hibernating: January's image on Dorset Wildlife Trust's new calendar Wildlife Encounters. Copyright Colin Varndell.

Nuthatch, February's image on Dorset Wildlife Trust's 2011 calendar. Copyright Colin Varndell.

Otter: Pictured for September 2011 on Dorset Wildlife Trust's new calendar Wildlife Encounters. Copyright Colin Varndell.

Mr Varndell is a long-standing member and supporter of Dorset Wildlife Trust. He said: “Dorset is one of the richest counties for wildlife in Britain. If it is to remain so, it is the responsibility of each and every one of us, as custodians of this natural heritage, to protect, preserve and improve it for future generations. We can all help to achieve this by supporting the Dorset Wildlife Trust.”

In other words, and entirely reasonably, given his own generosity in supplying pictures, he wants people to buy the Trust’s new calendar.

Myself, I think that’s an excellent idea.

The calendar is called Wildlife Encounters and it costs £5. It’s available from Dorset Wildlife Trust at www.dorsetwildlifetrust.org.uk/calendar or call 01305 264620.

It’s also stocked by most Dorset Tourist Information Centres, including Bridport, Dorchester, Shaftesbury, Wareham and Wimborne.

The county council wants to move the special school on to land next to Beaminster Technology College (BTC).

A national schools adjudicator gave his approval for the idea last year, and last month county council cabinet members agreed a budget of just under £9 million for the project.

If planning permission is granted, work could start next spring and a new Mountjoy could open in autumn 2012.

The aim is to serve 48 pupils with physical and learning disabilities, aged from two-and-a-half to 19.

BTC and Mountjoy would remain separate establishments, but the county council argues that Beaminster would benefit from improved sporting facilities, such as a new synthetic pitch, and alterations.

Changes would include new car parking facilities for Beaminster staff, which would be accessed from Tunnel Road, and should therefore reduce traffic along Fleet Street. An improved footpath would also link the schools with the town centre.

Answers to frequently asked questions about the scheme are available online at http://www.dorsetforyou.com/mountjoyschool

Full details of the application will be viewable later this week at http://www.dorsetforyou.com/planning

Search under the town name of Beaminster.

Editor’s Note: Based on a press release issued by Dorset County Council. I’ll update this piece when the planning application can be seen online.

You can be driving through a murky Mosterton, go through the tunnel and, abracadabra, emerge into a beaming Beaminster.

Dorset folk will say the weather is invariably better this side of the tunnel. Somerset Cuckoos – and I confess I am one – will probably say the opposite. But it works both ways.

You can be pootling up the twilight Tunnel Road and, bam, you come out into sunrise Somerset. It’s like a geographical time tunnel.

Here in Lush Places, however,  more times than not we are surrounded by fog when everywhere else in Dorset is bathed in light. A veil of mist hangs over Bluebell Hill nearly every day, hiding the tops of the beech trees as they say hello to the sky.

People move into the village and then, after a month or two, the truth dawns on them.

‘It’s always so damp and cold here,’ they whine.

‘We really didn’t realise that when we first came here,’ they say, as the people who sold them the house rub their hands in glee and roar off in a removal van towards Salway Ash.

But there are advantages in living in a cloud. For one thing, we are mightily grateful when we get even a twinkling of sunshine. And for another, it can be very useful to head up the hill in the swirling mist when you need to make a quick getaway.

Like the time when four of us descended on Netherbury for a quiz in the village hall. We won the main prize, the beer leg and three raffle prizes.

And before the natives even had time to mutter, ‘now just who were those bloody people?’ (although they would never swear as they’re far too genteel), we swiftly jumped into the car and drove into the clouds, never to be seen again.

Every cloud has a silver lining.

Hooke Park near Beaminster already boasts some of the most extraordinary buildings in Britain (see video), discussed by architects all over the world.

Now the Architectural Association, which owns the 350-acre site, has been given outline planning permission by West Dorset District Council to create many more unusual but influential structures.

There will be a range of experimental wooden buildings for students and teachers, including 12 accommodation units, a construction shed, a hall for lectures, exhibitions and events, a design studio, a seminar room, four offices, a replacement caretaker’s house, and dining and kitchen facilities.

The Architectural Association, the UK’s oldest school of architecture, is planning to use Hooke Park for a new graduate course called Design + Make.

Students will “seek to learn from local craftspeople with traditional skills in woodworking, boat building and construction. The aim is for a reciprocal knowledge-sharing relationship with the local community.”

Hooke Park’s history over the last thirty years has largely been forgotten in Dorset, but it’s fascinating.

It was, for a while, of global significance.

It sought to offer a model for 21st century lifestyle changes.

“Ace”: Hooke Park. Photograph by Sam Bush, from his blog And in my hands a camera

It’s a place with a great capacity to excite. Quite coincidentally, the excellent Bridport photographic blogger Sam Bush visited there with friends just days ago. It was, he writes, “amazing… ace… easily the best fun I’ve had in ages.”

A brief history

It’s more than 30 years since the internationally-renowned Beaminster furniture maker John Makepeace first conceived the idea of a new kind of forestry. In 1979 he went on a trip to Longleat with students from his craft school at Parnham House.

Nearly all week, it rained.

They sheltered in an old Nissen hut, and worked with wood freshly cut from a neglected coppice.

Mr Makepeace was impressed by how quick and easy it was to make sturdy useful things, and he began thinking about what could be done with the enormous number of small trees thinned out from commercial forests, which were normally pulped, burned as firewood, used as fenceposts or just discarded.

Surely better uses could be found?

The Hooke Park project began in 1983 in a 350-acre wood near Beaminster as an attempt to teach Britain – and the world – environmental and economic lessons.

Six years later, Hooke Park College opened.

Scuplture by Andy Goldsworthy at the entrance to Hooke Park. The work was sponsored by the Dorset-based charity Common Ground and South West Arts. Photograph copyright Ian Capper, reused under Creative Commons licence.

“Goldsworthy created his sculptures from second-grade timber which had grown on a hillside where the land had been slipping for many years: the trees had bent to compensate” (Jeremy Myerson, Makepeace, 1995). Photograph copyright Sarah Smith, reused under Creative Commons licence.

Central to Hooke’s programme of research and development was the idea of living and learning in buildings that would – literally – grow out of the woods.

And so – for a while – they did. For example, the Westminster Lodge, spanned with thinnings and topped with grass, was funded by the Duke of Westminster’s charitable trust.

One aim was to provide new models for housing and village life in the 21st century, particularly in sensitive landscapes like those of West Dorset.

Another was to inspire and train a new generation of environmentally-motivated designers and entrepreneurs.

Some – like Richard Lee, who now makes shepherd’s huts, and Simon Thomas Pirie, who designs and makes furniture – are still out there (Mr Lee is based in a big barn at Piddlehinton, Mr Pirie at Briantspuddle). The video below is about an English walnut kitchen made by Simon Pirie and his team for a client in the Cotswolds, near Bath.

Shepherd’s hut by Richard Lee from Plankbridge photo gallery.

Overall, however, Hooke Park College had a patchy record. Its running costs exceeded its income and it was wound up in the mid-1990s in complicated and sometimes acrimonious circumstances.

The Parnham Trust sought to run further courses, but eventually, in 2002, the whole site was acquired by the Architectural Association (founded by “troublesome students” in 1847).

A very exciting moment

The association now aims to resurrect Hooke’s original approach to building, with students and teachers using greenwood poles from the woods around them.

Hooke Park’s new director Martin Self has been busy up in London, but he wrote (in an e-mail) that he was enthusiastic about “a very exciting moment – now that the outline planning is in place and the new academic programme at Hooke is coming together.”

David Hodges, West Dorset District council’s case officer, said that council officers had been in discussion with the Architectural Association before it made the application that was recently approved.

He went on: “This approval will need to be followed by a series of individual applications (what we call the ‘reserved matters’) for the detailed designs of each building once these have been designed by the students before they can be constructed on site.  The council will continue to offer advice to the Architectural Association in making these reserved  matters applications at Hooke Park as the detailed designs come forward.”

The Hooke Park project was ahead of its time, but it’s been one of those West Dorset phenomena that has gradually spread ideas through the wider culture. Guy Mallinson, a graduate of Parnham House, recently appeared on BBC2′s Mastercrafts with his Woodland Workshop at Holditch over in the far west of Dorset.

As John Makepeace once said: “Now that energy, sustainability and employment are pressing issues, trees and timber offer new economic, social and environmental possibilities.”

Photograph by Agencia Brasil, reused under Creative Commons Licence.

IS THIS country too anchored in its past or feeling too guilty to be so politically correct?

There is a certain irony that Carnival should be studied in a country that has never been keen on Catholicism.

Mardi Gras, after all, is not very British.

Carnivals no longer have much to do with Lent but to my mind they do have a lot to do with cities.

Rio and London spring to mind, not the Jurassic Coast.

Weymouth or Bridport may well have wonderful carnivals but their reputation is not national, let alone international.

I have only lived here for two years, which makes me ignorant, but none of my forty-something friends that have lived here a while longer – or forever – have ever suggested going to either.

The events we do go to are ones anchored in many of the people who make up West Dorset and East Devon, the districts mainly relevant to the Jurassic Coast.

Culture and food

Take the world-renowned Bridport festival. If you write in English you will probably have heard of The Bridport Prize; thousands of entries from around 80 countries world-wide make a pretty wide introduction to a town and its world-class festival. But who has heard of the Bridport Carnival?

The Beaminster Festival of music and art – when the sleepy medieval town comes alive for a fortnight – is another example.

Dorset Arts Weeks is the largest Open Studios event in the country, 800 artists take part, and that’s only visual arts.

Food festivals compete with each other and attract hundreds of people, local and otherwise. Our area is filled with talented creatives and Dorset could lead the world in placing culture at the heart of quality of life. Who will lead the creatives or at least coordinate them I am not so sure. Working together to a common goal is not something I have seen enough proof of since I have lived in the UK (23 years) although thankfully this is slowly changing.  

Take Normandy as an example. Helped by the French government, Normandy has marketed itself as the birthplace of Impressionism. 2010 sees the largest Impressionists exhibition ever, drawing art enthusiasts from around the world: Americans and Japanese are very keen).

This did not happen in a day, it is a massive investment in time, effort, organisation, structures; more importantly it is born from a realisation that art is a medium by which rich and poor have always communicated, something that not only brings inspiration and well-being but also economic repercussions.

Would Impressionists be the same without Constable or Turner? Should we not celebrate our artists rather than leave them to be marginalised?

Why look to Carnivals in an area that is heavily anchored in the countryside and the sea?

West Dorset and East Devon are not about cities or even large towns, they are about communities that get together on a human scale to come up with child-friendly events, fêtes and festivals.

Drawing an analogy to music festivals, this is not Glastonbury, this is Truck.

Friendly, quirky, socially responsible, sustainable, on a human scale and a hell of a lot of fun.

It may be less socially acceptable to do research on art and culture and far more politically correct to conduct research on inner city leisure time.

Is this a case of looking to the industrial past that makes us believe that cities come first and foremost?

Is it a guilty feeling that countryside people are luckier than city people and need less investment from any governmental body?

Or is it a case of an idea coming from London or even Weymouth rather than from the people that actually live along the Coast concerned?

The originators of the idea cannot be blamed if their lack of vision is due to the lethargy of the people concerned.

We could point the finger if the people concerned have not been properly consulted or even informed. I have not lived here long enough to comment on this.

But I do know that information is difficult to get unless you actively look for it.

Thank you Real West Dorset for coming up yet again with an interesting debate.

Editor’s Note: The three-year PhD Carnival studentship is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, and the successful applicant will work with Exeter University academics and members of the Jurassic Coast World Heritage Site Arts Programme team.

The project will focus particularly, but not exclusively, on Weymouth, as there is “an agenda of connecting communities along the Jurassic Coast with communities sharing strong carnival cultures across the globe, the aim being to forge a globalised carnival community expressed through embodied performance and arts practice.”

Here, for the record, is the full list of research questions.

• What are the historical geographies of the Jurassic Coast’s carnivals?
• To what extent have elements of transgression, empowerment and resistance played a role in the movement and experience of the area’s carnivals?
• How is ‘carnival’ being used by the Jurassic Coast WHS Arts Programme as a vehicle for community cohesion and relational celebration, both along the coast and through UNESCO World Heritage Site networks?
• How is the local carnival heritage negotiated within the context of an internationally orientated festival that has a global audience?
• How does the mobilisation of carnival in different policy agendas impact on community engagement and participation within the practice of carnival?
• How does the transgressive nature of carnival and mobilization of arts practices within the event work through governance frameworks?

We might come back to the question, just for the fun of it, of whether the nature of carnival is transgressive or whether that notion, generally derived in modern academic discourse from the pre-war Russian critic and philosopher Mikhail Bahktin, is, arguably, wrong.

(And not just because I truly cannot think of anything transgressive I have ever seen in, for example, a Groves Nursery float).