Strong Island Charity Raffle Prize Update

Excuse the really long picture post again. It’s another little update to keep you up to speed with our 2nd Birthday Party at The Belle Isle this Thursday 30th September and I thought you would like to know what’s on offer as the date gets closer.

The tickets will be £1 each or £8 for 10 and will be available on the door on the night only, so grab a strip with your FREE Strong Island Ice Tea (limited drinks so get there early). Pet Sounds will provide the background music with a Strong Island VS Pet Sounds Playlist to accompany this relaxed social.

We will call the winning numbers sometime around 10pm. Listen for the bell…

All the donations to the Raffle will be available to win on the night and all of the proceeds are going to The Portsmouth Autism Support Network and The Portsmouth Lifeboat Station.

We look forward to seeing you.

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Strong Island 2nd Birthday & Charity Raffle

We hope you can all make it along to our 2nd Birthday Party at The Belle Isle next Thursday 30th. It’s shaping up to be quite a nice evening with a few friends new & old, accompanied with some drinks and a cheeky Raffle.

All the donations to the Raffle will be available to win on the night and all the proceeds are going to The Portsmouth Autism Support Network and The Portsmouth Lifeboat Station.

Raffle tickets will be available on the door on the night only, so grab a strip with your FREE Strong Island Ice Tea (limited drinks so get there early). Pet Sounds will provide the background music with a Strong Island VS Pet Sounds Playlist to accompany this relaxed social.

Prizes have kindly been donated from the following people: The Belle Isle / Bored / Portsmouth University / Paul Gonella / Claire Sambrook / Desperados Beer / Ian Parmiter / Rob Trigg / Wallspace gallery / Head Hairdressing / FarkFK / Southsea Fixed Gear / James Weaver / Mikee Ayling / Matt O’Neill / Diana Goss / Caleigh Illburn / Cat Vaughan / Steve Bomford / Owain Harris / Miki Organic / Louise Bush / Nick Hicking / Candice @ Inksquatch / MyDogSighs / Paul Thurlow and more to come. Prizes include tee shirts, drinks, hair cuts, photo shoots, art, prints, meals, photography and more besides. Check the photos below for just a taster of what’s on offer.

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Welcome onboard…

Over the past 21 months we have endeavored to bring to your screens as much past and present photography and facts, local events and gigs, art, design, exhibitions, skateboarding, cycling and much more besides from Portsmouth & Southsea in a very ‘Strong Island’ fashion.

And it seems to of worked. A little too well in some ways. With Strong Island now taking up more and more of our free time outside of our daily jobs it’s becoming harder to keep up with everything. Especially when you consider the truly remarkable amount of amazing things occurring locally. For such a small place it really is packed with lots to do and see.

With that said, we’re extremely happy to welcome good friends Southsea Gent Ben Mills and Senior Lecturer Claire Sambrook to the team. Both of whom are equally intrinsic to many of the events happening that you read about on Strong Island already. Both Ben and Claire are in very unique positions to help bring more to Strong Island and make it bigger and better. Welcome onboard guys.

We would also like to mention that Strong Island has benefited both of us hugely by bringing in a lot of extra ciricular work and helped us make many new friends, contacts and collaborators that we may not have met without reaching online popularity with you, our readers and supporters. We can’t thank you enough.

Cheers

Tristan & Paul

Goodbye Victoria Swimming Pool

Built back in the 1960s, Portsmouth’s Victoria Swimming Pool has helped serve the city community until the recent completion of the Mountbatten Centre pool, after which it closed it’s doors for the last time. Claire Sambrook was luck enough to get a last minute look around yesterday with her camera to capture some of the charm of the building. The building is due to be demolished today, making way for a new tower, set to be the tallest student accommodation building in the world.

You can see all of Claire’s photos over at her Flickr.

The Old Hockey Clubhouse

Something maybe not that well known is that the rink at the skatepark pre-dates the skatepark itself by quite some time. The large, soon to be knocked down, roller hockey clubhouse for the rink has been closed and empty for some time but recently Claire Sambrook was lucky enough to get a few minutes to have a poke around. The photos from the clubhouse can be seen on Claire’s Flickr.

Love Your Bike Portsmouth

Following on with more Claire Sambrook activity, you may have heard the whispers and nudges regarding the upcoming event Love Your Bike Portsmouth on 30th May. Claire has been working her knitted socks off getting this together with some seriously heavy local contributors including design aficionados ilovedust, Bored of Southsea, Ian Parmiter, Haslemere Cyles, PCM, Josie Young, Sifer Design, not to mentioned such amazing contributors from further afield like Ben Wilson and Toyko Fixed Gear to name a few, and of course our good selves at Strong Island.

“Bike culture is an important part of cycling and regaining the streets. Love Your Bike Portsmouth aims to encourage participants to fully embrace the possibilities of connecting with their bikes and explore the many ways that they can improve it’s appearance and design.

As part of a day event and showcase you will be offered the chance to ‘Customise Your Bike and in turn ‘Love Your Bike’.
Demonstrations will be staged by local and national artists and designers who will offer sessions in customisation and collaboration. International designer Ben Wilson will be welding bikes at the skatepark and also showcasing some of his work. There will be a wide selection of bikes and accessories available for purchase to suit all budgets. Local artists and designers will be involved with helping paint frames and customise bike parts. Does your bike need a make-over?

Watch out for our Love Your Bike custom tags around the city. If you have been tagged then please send your pics to us and also turn up at the event to showcase your bike or have it customised.”

Check out loveyourbikeportsmouth.co.uk and Facebook for much more info.

Yarnbombing

Mixing up the knitting needles and the street art, yarnbombing involves using knitting and needlework to create art that envelopes street objects in a form of non-destructive, tactile graffiti. Claire Sambook (one of the queen bees of activity and creativity in Southsea) has been out and about with her own knitting needle spray cans, keep your eyes peeled for more in the coming months. And if your needles are getting the itch, get involved and be sure to send some photos our way.

Below are a couple photos, to see loads more check out Claire’s Flickr.

PRIMARY – Extended & Improved

We have some great news about our PRIMARY phonography exhibition (find out all the details here) that we can now announce:

- The deadline for submissions has now been extended to Sunday 4th March. We have had some incredible submissions but want to set aside more time to make the exhibition something really special.

- The competition is now open to up to 10 submissions from each individual. With the ability to capture many photos on your phone over the next two months we we want you to not feel restricted to just three. The same rules apply about the photos conforming to compositions using the primary colours though. If you have already submitted feel free to send more photos over as and when you please.

- The exhibition will be hosted by Albert Road’s own Bonzo Studio who are also partnering up with us in the creation of the exhibition space. More news on this soon!

- Finally, we will be running a competition as part of the exhibition where the best three photos submitted will win some incredible prizes. We will be announcing the prizes available very soon but got to say, these will be the best prize haul we have ever offered.

- We will be putting together a poster for the exhibition that will be on sale on the opening night. The poster will feature some of the best submissions and all profits from the sales will go to a local charity (details to follow soon). Due to this we need to say that any photos submitted to PRIMARY will involve you giving us permission to use them for commercial purposes, if you do not want your photo used in this way simply let us know via email.

Well, that is it for now! We really hope to drum up as much coverage locally for PRIMARY in the next couple of months so if you could Facebook/Tweet/+1 about the exhibition we would really appreciate it. We would love this exhibition to be a real reflection of the whole population of Portsmouth with everyone taking part and feeling involved.

It’s going to be a Strong Movember – Closed at £725

Righto chaps, it’s time to clean shave your boat race and get that mighty moustache on the grow in support of Movember for The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. For 30 days of November you can help support and raise awareness through selflessly parading your top lip for charity.

You can sign up yourself, as I’m sure many of you already have, or you can join the Strong Island team and seek out sponsorship as a team. Through the Strong Island Movember page you can ask people to join the group, make donations, upload photos and post updates via the MoSpace page, Facebook and Twitter.

Head over to www.mobro.co/StrongIsland if you would like to get involved and grow a Strong Moustache to help raise awareness, or simply head over to www.uk.movember.com and sign up to personally raise money.

The funds raised in the UK support the number one and two male specific cancers – prostate and testicular cancer. The funds raised are directed to programmes run directly by Movember and our men’s health partners, The Prostate Cancer Charity and the Institute of Cancer Research. Together, these channels work together to ensure that Movember funds are supporting a broad range of innovative, world-class programmes in line with our strategic goals in the areas of awareness and education, survivorship and research.

Poster: Tristan Savage