Exploring Old Portsmouth with Vintage Secret

Naomi Thompson is a well respected vintage fashion writer, blogger, stylist and personal shopper who recently moved to Portsmouth after a long stint in London and has been discovering the city and the island with fresh eyes. Naomi recently put up a post on www.vintagesecret.com where she explores around The Camber and Old Portsmouth with lots of great photos to illustrate why Portsmouth can be an inspirational place. Click on the link below to see and read more. You can follow Vintage Secret on Twitter too HERE.

www.vintagesecret.com/2012/01/inspiration/

Last Day – Strong Island Exhibition

Today is the last day of The Strong Island Exhibition at The Round Tower, Old Portsmouth. It is open from 10am – 3pm. Last chance for you to buy exclusive work by over 30 local creatives. It has been such a success with over 4,000 people visiting in 2 weeks. Thanks to all the support we have had and big thanks to Fark for all his help and enthusiasm. Photographs below of some of the visitors and also limited edition screenprints by Portsmouth University BA Graphic Design student Kingsley Nebechi.

Strong Island Exhibition – TONIGHT

The day has arrived. Get down to The Round Tower, Old Portsmouth from 6pm tonight. Open 10-3pm Tues-Sun until 1st May. See over 40 local creatives exhibit their work – all working to a ‘Strong Island’ theme. Strong Island Hopper Ale, Strong Island Tea, Jack Palmer and Will McNicol performing. Loads of coverage and support on this – BBC South Today, BBC Solent, Express FM, Portsmouth News. See the website for further information and photographs from the past few days in development – http://www.theroundtower.co.uk/

The Strong Island Exhibition – A Reminder

A big reminder that The Strong Island Exhibition at The Rower Tower has it’s launch night this Friday evening. Claire has been super busy collecting all the pieces together in the last few weeks and we are absolutely in awe at the quality of work and can’t wait to share them with everyone. The work includes paintings, illustration, design, photography, etc plus they’ll be a special bicycle from Chris Borneo and Ye Olde Bike Shoppe, looking forward to seeing that. The night includes refreshments (including Strong Island Hopper ale) plus live music from Jack Palmer, all kicking off from 7pm. If you want to keep up with what’s going on at The Round Tower visit www.theroundtower.co.uk. If you can’t make it the exhibition will be open for free for two weeks PLUS there will be a shop open selling Strong Island merchandise, items from the Aspex shop and other good stuff.

The Creative Portsmouth book is also officially launched before the exhibition so get down even earlier for that. Lots to celebrate!

Looking forward to seeing everyone there and one of Portsmouth’s best spaces back to life again.

Strong Island Exhibition Progress

The final line-up for the Strong Island exhibition at The Round Tower from 16th April – 1st May is as follows:
In no particular order:

Rob Trigg, Diana Goss, Farfk, Pseudonym, Inksquatch, Matt Howarth, My Dog Sighs, Jodie Silsby, Bruce Jamieson, Dave Thompson, Mikey Ayling, Louise Bush, Joe Cavalla, Sodavekt, Matt O’Neill, Alex Ings, Lorna Apps Woodland, Tom McCaughan, Roo Abrook, Andrew Whyte, Ashley John, Ken Leung, Paul Gonella, Tristan Savage, Claire Sambrook, Deane Clark, The Caravan Gallery, Thomas Keegan, Lloyd Jones, Lucy Doherty, Ben Hoath, Lorna Harrington, Mimic, Mark Persaud, Kingsley Nebechi and Jack Margerison.

Nominated by aspex –  Arran Macintosh.

PLUS – Badger Press, aspex, James Weaver and Bored will be selling work in the Round Tower shop.

Some of the exhibitors are also documenting their progresses. Joseph Cavalla, Ashley John and Lloyd Jones are featured below.

Be sure to visit the Round Tower website to see progress.

The Strong Island Exhibition at The Round Tower

All is finally revealed and we have some rather exciting news for you today. It’s our announcement of the 1st Strong Island local creatives exhibition at The Round Tower in Old Portsmouth. The Round Tower and surrounding buildings are currently being turned into a contemporary creative quarter and for the past two years extensive work has been done to clear out the interiors, fix leaks and identify usage.

The Round Tower is now soon to be opened as a continuing gallery space and Strong Island are proud to be involved in the very first exhibition. Over 30 local creatives have been invited to participate and we will soon be revealing the names. You can follow the progress of the gallery space and each individual creative over at www.theroundtower.co.uk. Paul Gonella is currently making a documentary of the progress leading up the exhibition and this will be available to view on the website in due course.

We will be making a pretty huge thing of this in the coming weeks and really hope that you can all make it down to have a look and say hello. Remember it’s you the readers, contributors, creatives and locals that make Strong Island what it is and this exhibition is a direct result of this. We appreciate everything that people have done for us to reach this point. Having the first exhibition at The Round Tower is a huge honour for us, and we must say a incredible thank you to Claire Sambrook who has arranged and helped organise the whole thing.

Dates of the exhibition: Launch Night – Friday 15th April from 6pm. Open to the public 16th April – 1st May 10-3pm.

Posters and Logo have been designed by Tristan Savage and the website by Paul Gonella. Thanks to Stephan, Paul and Jack from Badger Press for helping with the screen-printed posters.

Round Tower Sneak Peak

Here’s a little sneaky view at development over at The Round Tower in Old Portsmouth. Initiated and led by Claire Sambrook, keep ‘em peeled for something very special from Strong Island to begin the Towers new lease of life.

Photos: Claire Sambrook

Portsmouth’s Arts Quarter

The News last week published an article on the interesting developments happening down at the Hot Walls and Round Tower in Old Portsmouth with the creation of Portsmouth’s own Arts Quarter. The area is the most visited location in Portsmouth, despite it being empty, and the artist impression and details are exciting news, more so considering the laughable conclusion by The Times that the city is one of the worst for culture (see here for more on that nonsense).

We will have some Strong Island related news on The Round Tower very soon.

Time Team in Old Portsmouth

Governor’s Green in Old Portsmouth was featured on Time Team the other week where they looked at the history of Royal Garrison Church all the way back to when it was part of an early medieval hospital through to when it was part of a Tudor mansion. The show also included loads of fascinating insights in to the history and geography of the area too. Well worth a watch here on 4od. You can also read the dig report and notes by Faye Simpson.

Old Ships and The Point

Continuing from the HMS Vanguard photos from earlier this week, this one shot from above shows the scale of the ship and her guns, which are as big as the pubs! The second photo is of HMS Victorious passing out in the 50s, with the old power station in the background. Hard to believe such a huge, dominating landmark like that is now just a memory.

Click on the images to see larger versions. Photos are taken from the wonderful Portsmouth From The Air book by Anthony Triggs.

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