The Open House Festival takes place throughout August in Bangor, near Belfast, Northern Ireland.
More than just a festival… It’s a month long music and arts festival in August and the vintage-themed Seaside Revival Festival on Bangor seafront but we also recently opened our very own multi-purpose venue, The Court House. In addition, we promote one-off shows in Belfast on a year round basis and as we are an independent non-profit arts charity, any surplus generated from these events is used towards our community projects.
I’ll be talking Wallis in China on August 9th (click here for details and tickets) at the beautiful Court House in Bangor (below)…
Mark O’Neill will talk about his book ‘Liang Sicheng – The Guardian of China’s Architectural History’. Liang Sicheng ( 梁思成) was the Father of Architecture in China. During the 1930s and 1940s, he and his wife travelled to more than 200 counties in the interior and found 2,738 ancient buildings. The two discovered the richness and diversity of China’s architectural heritage and, through their books and drawings, made them available to the world, both Chinese and non-Chinese.
Photographer Heinz von Perckhammer, Peking, 1928, Published by Albertus-Verlag GmbH of Berlin with a foreword by Arthur Holitscher (Hungarian playwright, novelist, essayist and travel writer)….
Baseball writer and historian Gary Cieradkowski has fleshed out the story of Roy Counts, who was the other imprisoned baseball player who escaped from prison in America with Jack Riley (from my book City of Devils) – Riley of course headed off to Shanghai, Counts went in a different direction… click here…
Raymond Spencer Millard (1920-1997) was originally from Derbyshire and was a specialist on road building who worked throughout the UK and the colonies. The following four paintings are of Hong Kong and begun and finished in the 1970s and 1980s. Millard obviously took some time as he records that most were started in 1976/1977, but the final painting of Shun Wan Harbour was begun in 1977 and only completed in 1987.
You may not know this but Wallis Simpson stayed in Felixstowe, Suffolk, in 1936 while she was awaiting her divorce from her second husband, Ernest Simpson. And now she’s returning – at least in some slides as I’m talking about her China years at this year’s Felixstowe Book Festival. Tickets and details here
