Nostalgia: Look at these old photos of the Garden Festival!
The festival was part of the then Tory government's initiative to revitalize areas impacted by the decline of heavy industry.
It was built on the former steelworks land and dubbed 'The Garden Festival of Wales.'
A dragon sculpture at the Garden Festival Ebbw Vale (Image: Lesley Rickard) Hundreds of visitors each day would flock to the site to experience the magic of the only garden festival in Wales.
It was thought to have attracted at least two million visitors during its time.
With memorable attractions such as Gryff the festival mascot, large dragon sculptures, a working railway, national flower shows and an abundance of shops there was something for everyone to enjoy!
A man on a unicycle juggling flaming batons at the Garden Festival Ebbw Vale (Image: Lesley Rickard) The Garden Festival first opened on May 1, 1992, and sadly closed on October 4, 1992.
Look at these cracking photos of the Garden Festival at the peak of its success!
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Spectator
3 days ago
- Spectator
Give Eric Ravilious a rest
How do artists sustain a reputation? We'd like to think it's on the basis of their work. In the case of visual artists, it would be nice to think they make it because their art is beautiful, original or absorbing. It shouldn't be a matter of what the art is about, or Benjamin West's epic historical tableaux would be better paintings than Jean Siméon Chardin's still lives. It shouldn't be about the artist's personality or history, or we would rate Benjamin Haydon (tragic suicide) over John Constable (domestically inclined Tory). On the other hand, it doesn't always work like that. Because the visual arts depend a great deal on public patronage – the promotion of individual artists by institutions – an artist can be continually pushed without any real reference to their quality. Other quite irrelevant factors can be enough to forge a career. The ongoing reputation of the English artist Eric Ravilious is a mysterious example. He was a commercial artist before the second world war, designing mugs for Wedgwood, including the coronation mugs for Edward VIII, repurposed for George VI and Elizabeth II. There are some popular book illustrations (the woodcut on the front of Wisden is his). On the side he painted watercolours of landscapes, often including chalk figures and downlands, very suitable for the sort of travel posters he produced. When the second world war broke out, he was made an official war artist, specialising in images of barrage balloons, ships in harbour and so on. He was killed on a trip to Iceland in 1942 to observe a sea rescue mission, the first war artist to be killed in service during the conflict. The art is perfectly OK in an interwar commercial style. Any kind of movement defeats Ravilious, and the massive industrial objects of the war are reduced to perky little bibelots. The colours are dismally mimsy. There is nothing much to him at all. And yet Ravilious is a favourite of curators, his work thrust on us by one exhibition after another. Why Ravilious? If you bought a ticket for an exhibition of many of his contemporaries – John Piper, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer – you know you'd find a bigger talent; if it's a question of an artist with a commercial practice, you'd have a better time with Edward Ardizzone, Ronald Searle, Edmund Dulac. Ardizzone exhibitions are thin on the ground; those of Dulac as rare as hen's teeth. But Ravilious thunders on in his depressing way. The basis of the reputation goes back to the circumstances of Ravilious's career. From the beginning of the 1930s, it was taken for granted that the creative arts ought to be about something important. The publisher Victor Gollancz, the most influential of his time, wrote to an author at the beginning of the decade to say that his books were 'designed to convert people on a big scale to socialism and pacifism… in the case of books that are not directly on this subject… I have to look very carefully at the question as to whether or not it is likely to involve a loss…' During the second world war, novels were only permitted paper allocation within the 13.1 per cent assigned to 'general' publications; as a result, the printer of Henry Green's sublime Caught warned the publisher that the ministry was inquiring about the 'kind of work' being printed. (In the end, the adulterous affair in Caught had to be dropped.) Art in general had to be Important, and About Something. Whether it was any good came a long way behind the point that it was a depiction of barrage balloons, submarines being cleaned, or banal but inspiring images of English national pride like chalk figures. On top of that, Ravilious scored extra points by being married to another artist, Tirzah Garwood, with obvious biographical interest, and by being killed in nobly inspiring circumstances. If it were just a matter of the wartime circumstances in which the art was produced, it would hardly matter – posterity would move on, the market and taste would prefer what it always does, skilled, interesting and varied work, whether it's about something important or not. In the auction room, Ravilious's work sometimes appeals, but doesn't come near the levels of his more alluring contemporaries. And he's now everywhere – on tea towels, biscuit tins and posters in every southern English seaside town, and imitated by designers for all sorts of cutesy purposes. (The cover of the fake du jour, The Salt Path, has a definite fake-woodcut-fake-Ravilious thing going on.) But it's not just commercial applications. What keeps Ravilious going is a culture of value among curators that has come to prize particular biographical facts, significant subject matter, and in some cases – not Ravilious's – the identity of the artist. We've grown used as gallery-goers to truly terrible art which, it is explained, deplores a few particular historical crimes. Sometimes the art is terrible because it is nothing more than a plonking explanation; sometimes, on top of the explanation, it is terrible because the artist is incompetent. And the curatorial tendency reaches back into history. So let's give Ravilious a rest. Let's agree that most of the art of the past survives because, even though it's about nothing much, it is clever and entrancing to look at. Manet's white asparagus isn't a denunciation of luxury foodstuffs and the capitalist system that only feeds the rich – and it wouldn't be a better painting if it were. Picasso is supposed to have lost his temper over Matisse's career: 'Matisse! What is a Matisse?! A balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it!' What we are slightly missing is a delight in artists with nothing more to them than a balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it. Instead, what we have to put up with are explanations of art and the promotion of artists who, if their art can't make you feel anything much, can always be relied upon to supply quite a sad little story from their life.
Daily Mirror
21-07-2025
- Daily Mirror
Michael Gove reacts to ex-wife's comments as she claims 'everyone thinks he's gay'
Ex Tory politician Michael Gove has shared his reaction to ex-wife Sarah Vine's latest book, in which she speaks about their relationship, divorce and rumours around his sexuality Former politician Michael Gove has reacted to ex-wife Sarah Vine 's comments about him and their relationship, following her recent claims that "everyone's always thought Michael was gay". Sarah, 58, opens up about her 21-year marriage and its downfall in her book How Not To Be A Political Wife, which came out earlier this year. Appearing on Good Morning Britain today, Michael Gove, 57, was asked by presenter Ed Balls how he felt about his "mixed write-up" in the book after she wrote about how Brexit was responsible for their divorce. "I think that's probably fair," Michael said. "I think that it's in the nature of Sarah's writing that she writes without fear or favour." He added: "Sarah very kindly sent me a copy of the book before it was published and said, 'Is there anything in it that you really object to?' and I thought, 'I'm not going to be a censor.' "There are some bits in it that inevitably any husband or any friend of Sarah's will read and their eyes will be out on stalks but it's her voice." When asked whether he would do anything different after reading her criticism about their marriage, Michael said: "I think the most important thing is to spend as much time as possible, more time being present with your family." The ex Conservative politician admitted that he would often spend "an extra half hour" perfecting an argument or convincing someone to back what he was doing, when he should have been with his family. "It's a half hour that's away from your wife and your children." It comes just weeks after Sarah opened up about rumours around her ex-husband's sexuality while appearing on Best's Suddenly Single podcast. 'There were always rumours about Michael's sexuality," she said. "When I went on the skiing holiday [where she met him], one of the senior executives said, 'oh Michael, he's lovely but he's gay'. That was 30 years ago. "Everyone's always thought Michael was gay. I married him. Maybe I'm just deluded, but from all my evidence – two children! – even if he was gay … It wouldn't bother me. "If he'd said I need to get divorced because I'm gay that wouldn't have upset me. I think people need to be their authentic self, and if that's who you are then that's who you should be.' She added that they chose to separate before the Covid pandemic and that while politics had "done some damage", it was Brexit that was the final straw. "The fall out was incredibly toxic and personal. People on the Remain side were so vicious. I just wanted to run away from the whole thing and Michael had this desire to try and make it right. "After Theresa May took over, she fired him, and there was a period when he wasn't a front-line politician and that was quite good. I felt he was coming back, because you do lose them to politics, and then she rang him and said did he want to be Environment Secretary, and he went back in. That's when I thought, we really don't want the same thing anymore.'
The National
21-07-2025
- The National
Zarah Sultana calls out 'racist' cartoon in Observer
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