David Hockney: The Tourist Trail Starts Here

David Hockney, the godfather of British art, is about to start work in a new medium that he has been famously dismissive of in the past. Tourism.

Bridlington-based Hockney is in the process of creating an official tourist trail to a number of sites across his home county of Yorkshire, with a particular focus on those places he has painted in his beloved Yorkshire Wolds as part of his Royal Academy exhibition which opens in January.

It represents a change of heart by Hockney who has been reluctant to promote Yorkshire in the past as he famously does not like crowds of people. This is one of the reasons he settled in Los Angeles, because of the lack of celebrity chasing that he experienced in Britain and then Paris in the 1970s.

Even at the press conference to launch next year’s Royal Academy exhibition he expressed concern that his paintings might result in an influx of people to the Wolds altering its atmosphere and appeal, especially to him.

However, he is a pragmatist too and he recognises that the David Hockney RA: A Bigger Picture exhibition will put the Yorkshire Wolds on the global map for artists as well as tourists as the bulk of the landscape and film works being exhibited were done in this quiet corner of East Yorkshire.

It is already being talked about as Hockney Country in the art world, just as Suffolk is recognised as Constable Country.

So Britain’s greatest living artist has agreed to work with the county’s tourist board, Welcome to Yorkshire, to create an official tourist trail, rather than allow unofficial versions or websites to incorrectly identify the sites at which he has worked.

It is not yet known whether he will actively promote the trail himself or just lend his name and copyright to it.

Sites likely to be featured would include the village of Warter where he painted Bigger Trees (which were subsequently chopped down) and Bigger Trees Near Warter (which still exist). Although it is not part of the Royal Academy exhibition it remains one of his most famous works from the Wolds, a giant painting made up of 50 canvases measuring 40 feet in width.

Other areas which are likely to be included would be Garrowby Hill and Sledmere, both of which are re-imagined workings of the landscapes he knows so well, rather than painted en plein air like those in Warter.

Thixendale, where he has painted three trees through the seasons might also be included as well as Woldgate Woods, outside the village of Kilham, both of which feature in the new Royal Academy exhibition.

However, Bridlington, where he now spends most of his time rather than in Los Angeles, might not be featured, just in case the trail creates Hockney Hunters intent on finding the ultimate spot on the Hockney Trail, his studio.

Its a Dog's Life in Yorkshire

Yorkshire is about to become a dog’s best friend as the county’s latest luxury hotel unveils plans to open the UK's first dedicated dog hotel and spa.

Raithwaite Hall in Sandsend, North Yorkshire, a £30m refurbished country house retreat, opened its doors to human customers two weeks ago but its plans are to extend its luxury offering to pampered pooches across the world allowing owners and pets to holiday together.

A new 28-room dog hotel will be built on the 80-acre site with dedicated spa facilities and luxury extras for their canine guests, including hydrotherapy pool, grooming, obedience classes, kennelling and even a luxury food menu for their owners to choose from.

Guests staying in the separate house, called The Keep [pictured], due to open next autumn, will enjoy the same luxurious standard of fixtures and fittings as the main hotel, but each room will include a special area for dogs to sleep in, allowing man’s best friend to holiday with their owners rather than being left behind in kennels or with family or friends.

Paul Ellis MD of the Skelwith Group, owners of the Raithwaite Hall estate explained: "We have now opened a fantastic hotel for humans and want to be able to offer the same guest experience to dogs too.  When people are choosing hotels it is often easier to find venues that cater for their children but not their dog. Dogs are often a massive part of the family so we want to cater for these travellers too."

Skelwith is part of US firm West Paces Hotel Group and it was a business decision to make provision for a dog hotel as dog holidays are well catered for in America. The firm plans to market heavily in the US to attract an established audience. 
The market for dog holidays is relativley untapped in the UK as many places do not allow them to stay with their owners. That is changing but the potential for holidaymakers to take their dog on holiday could be a rich new source of income for savvy hotelliers and guesthouse owners. Pets are a billion pound industry with pet food alone worth £1.8bn in Britain, without taking into account vet costs, toys and other pet-related paraphernalia.

And the momentum is definitely with dogs. The number of households with dogs has overtaken cats for the first time in the last five years with an estimated 8.3million dogs in the UK and almost a quarter of homeowners sharing their life with a dog in 2010 (22.9%: Source: Mintel for Pet Food Manufacturers' Association). It is predicted that dogs will outnumber cats in the UK for the first time too during the course of 2011.

Raithwaite Hall, once the retreat of a former shipping magnate, backs onto public footpaths which lead to the beach as well as inland towards the moors so there is plenty for dogs and their owners to explore and f
or those wishing to recreate an iconic canine moment they can take the short walk from Sandsend to Whitby where in Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Count Dracula first set foot on English soil, disguised, rather appropriately, as a dog.

Saucy Postcards Titilating a New Audience

Henpecked husbands and buxom blondes are being brought back to life as the saucy postcards that epitomised trips to the seaside in the heyday of summer holidays are being re-launched for a modern audience.

The world famous designs, some of which were banned in their pomp for breaching obscenity rules, were created in West Yorkshire by the firm Bamforth & Co and are now being reproduced under a new licence, shortly to appear on greeting cards, sweets, fridge magnets and, perhaps appropriately, underwear.

The history of the postcards dates back to 1870 when James Bamforth, a portrait photographer opened an eponymous business in Holmfirth initially specialising in lantern slides, however it was the launch of saucy postcards in 1910 that changed the firm’s direction. They proved so popular that shortly after the First World War 20 million postcards were being sold every year and by 1960 Bamforth was the world's largest publisher of comic postcards. 

Leeds-based businessman Ian Wallace, who kept the company in Yorkshire after buying it from Scarborough printing firm Dennis when it collapsed in 2001 is behind the drive to reacquaint the public with what became a British institution.

He said: “The 40,000 images are known the world over and vie with the old Carry On films in popularity. The future is very bright for a company that looked doomed a few years ago.”

The designs are definitely from an era before political correctness became popular. One typical scene shows a couple trying to put up a windbreak on the beach. The wife says to her husband: “It’s too soft Fred, it won’t stay in, shall I hit it with the mallet?” The innuendo implied is obvious.

Wallace added: “They’re just a bit of fun, 99% of people who read them and look at them enjoy them.”

Another postcard shows a scene typical of a Bamforth postcard and one with was richly mined over the years, the nudist colony. A man at a barbecue says to a lady, “Watch out which bloody sausages you’re pricking missus!”

The appeal of postcards belongs to a different age now, with email, smartphones, social networking and tablets replacing the need to send a card from our holidays. However, the appeal of the designs that titillated British seasiders for generations has not diminished judging by the number of licensees who will be working with Bamforths going forward.

So prepare your sense and sensibilities for another Bamforth boom only this time blushing vicars, knowing wives and nudists will appear on beer glasses, mugs, coasters, bookmarks, t-shirts, pyjamas and even metal signs.

Picasso and Da Vinci in residence to regenerate Rotherham

Picasso and pals to star in Rotherham

Rotherham, whose recent headline grabbing initiatives include mums defying Jamie Oliver’s healthy eating regime by selling fast food through the school railings, is shrugging off its junk food associations and moving into the art world by re-launching itself as an open air gallery.

The south Yorkshire town is undergoing a visual transformation as over 60 pieces of artwork by local, national and world renowned artists are being reproduced on a grand scale – some 4m by 8m – and displayed on the side of buildings in over 35 town centre locations. Plans are for the gallery to be in place for a number of years with art trails being distributed in the local tourism information centre.

The initiative is the brainchild of the local business community who wanted to encourage more visitors to Rotherham to help regenerate the town centre and drive the local economy. A similar scheme ran in York a few years ago to critical acclaim.

The first installations from local artists have been going up this week and will sit alongside famous works by Picasso, Da Vinci, Cezanne, Castleford's-own Henry Moore, Van Gogh and Rousseau as well as works by local schools.

Nick Cragg, local entrepreneur and chair of the Rotherham Economy Board, who is spearheading the project, said: “Rotherham will be one of the first towns in the UK to have its own open air art gallery which is fantastic news and will help to play an important part in its regeneration and further economic growth. The pieces have been carefully selected so that we could exhibit works of world renowned masters, whilst providing a platform for Rotherham’s own artists, as well as local young people to display their work.”

He added: “Like all good galleries, this one will evolve and we hope to add new artwork in spring next year, with the project having secured funding to run for at least 18 months. We are hoping further private sponsorship will mean it can run for many years to come.”

The organisers have already partnered with some heavyweight art allies, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the Hepworth Gallery up the road in neighbouring Bretton and Wakefield as well as the National Gallery and will consult with the public on what other pieces of artwork local people would like to see reproduced when the display is reviewed and updated in spring next year.

Yorkshire prepares to reclaim Hockney

Hockney's six canvas Woldgate Woods in East Yorkshire

Bradford-born David Hockney is synonymous with Los Angeles and sunny California but all that is about to change as a new exhibition of his landscape paintings reclaims him for the county of his birth, Yorkshire.

David Hockney: A Bigger Picture opens in January at the Royal Academy of Arts in London and Hockney hopes the collection of new work, the majority of which has been painted in East Yorkshire where he lives when he is not in the Hollywood Hills, will be as iconic for Yorkshire as his infamous swimming pool paintings were for Los Angeles in the 1960s.

He said: “It’s a landscape I know from my childhood, it has meaning to me, but I never thought of it as a subject matter until 10 years ago when I realised, for me at my age, it was a terrific subject, a marvellous place.”

Adding: “It’s a lovely bit of England still, not spoilt very much.”

Over 150 works will be shown across the Royal Academy’s Main Galleries, including sketches, ipad drawings, video installations and giant paintings that span the width of the walls.

Such has been quality of the body of work produced that one of that exhibition’s curators Edith Devaney from the Royal Academy predicts Hockney will become forever associated with East Yorkshire just as fellow painter John Constable is with Suffolk.

Hockney makes for an unlikely tourism ambassador. He shot to fame as a leading light in the British Pop Art movement in the 1960s and moved to southern California shortly afterwards. He doesn’t like crowds of people, which is why the solitude of the Yorkshire Wolds is so appealing to him. The thought of a surge of tourists heading to Yorkshire to see the places depicted in his paintings fills him with a slight dread and yet the global attention this exhibition is bound to generate is almost guaranteed to attract art lovers from across the world to discover Hockney’s Yorkshire.

They’d be advised to set aside a few days as his influence spans the width of the county. He was born in the west and studied art at Bradford; Salts Mill in Saltaire still houses one of the finest collections of his work in the world, one he constantly adds to and updates. In the east, locations in the Yorkshire Wolds such as Kilham, Garrowby Hill and Thixendale are about to put on the map by the new exhibition, as will Bridlington on the Yorkshire coast, where he lives when he is not in California, and of which he said:

“I’ve been going to Bridlington for a long time I’ve spent over 30 Christmasses there [at the home of his mother and sister] and I never stayed in the winter that much as I thought it was too cold and too dark but the first time I did, I realised how beautiful the winter was, it was not black or white, it was not grey, in fact sometimes there was more colour than the summer.”

Hockney said he hoped that when the exhibition opened in January it would open people’s eyes to the beauty of spring and encourage people to look more at their changing surroundings. He might not like it very much but the exhibition might also result in him having to share his beloved East Yorkshire with more people than he is used to as the county reclaims one of its most famous sons.

The exhibition will run at the Royal Academy from 21 January 2012 to 9 April 2012.

Ebor Festival in the Pink for Ladies

As the fall out from this month's pockets of unrest continued, York Racecourse put all economic and social worries to one side and had a riot of its own - only this time it was a riot of colour and, suitably for Ladies Day at the Ebor Festival, it was pink.

Pink dresses mixed with pink hats underneath the giant pink branding of the headline sponsor as glasses of champagne (pink optional) chinked winner after winner. The historic old Knavesmire blushed with pride as 30,000 people came together in August sunshine to meet, eat, drink and get merry.

No need for Facebook or Twitter feeds to create a flash mob crowd here, this was social networking of the old fashioned kind. Orderly queues were formed for the Champagne Lawn as the brass band led the percussion of glasses. Knights of the realm cast careful eyes over their equine assets, A-level students so recently graded, celebrated, and thousands upon thousands of well-dressed racegoers squeezed into tailored suits and favourite frocks to embrace the spirit of the day’s dressing up. Hats were a talking point, an edible horse made from Yorkshire produce another and the sight of a jovial Sir Alex Ferguson - despite having no winners - caused an afternoon stir amongst onlookers at the Parade Ring.

Behind the fashion and famous faces though, Ladies Day is big business. Without the festival – shifted to include a Saturday for the first time in the hope of attracting a new weekend audience – the city and the county would be a much poorer place. It is estimated that the racecourse contributes £58m to York businesses, benefitting everyone from taxi-drivers to hairdressers and, judging by the shoes on show, chemists for blister repair kits.

Nick Fazackerley, general manager of hospitality at the racecourse explained the demand his team has to cope with: “We have 30,000 bottles of champagne delivered for the festival and during Ladies Day we would expect to get through 8-10,000 bottles. We also have 100 kegs of Pimms delivered which contain 20,000 glasses and we’re expecting over 4,000 of those glasses to be drunk today. “In terms of hospitality Ladies Day is the biggest of the Festival with about 5,000 covers, there is not a spare seat in the house, everyone wants to be here for Ladies Day.”

As with all things horseracing, numbers are key and it looks like William Derby, the clerk of the course, is backing an odds on favourite. The Ebor Festival is definitely in the pink and with a new 93,000 attendance record this week, it looks like to could be blooming for years to come. 

Holidaymakers create new North-South divide

The Angel of the North celebrates the news

Whisper it quietly among the home counties and the capital but new figures from Visit England, the national tourist board, show something of a northern uprising taking place among UK holidaymakers.

According to the Great Britain Tourism Survey, Visit England’s regular research into our habits as holidaymakers, there is a very stark north-south divide developing, one where the north is proving considerably more popular than the south.

Trips to the North West (+9%), North East (+24%) and Yorkshire and the Humber (+14%) collectively increased an impressive 47% in the first quarter of this year whereas visits to the South East (-15%), South West (+9%) and London (- 11%) collectively were in negative territory - 17%.

Without wanting to inflame regional stereotypes it appears the public no longer thinks it is grim up north as those domestic visits occurred during the meat of winter – January to March – at a time when snow and ice lingered the longest and after the extended festive holiday season had ended.

Unhelpfully, Visit England does not give any reason for the increases, or for that matter, particularly in the case of London and the South East, the decreases, but we can speculate that the economic squeeze on household incomes has had some part to play with us preferring to stay at home even if it won’t have dictated our final destinations.

That said, the economic situation has not been as bad as to stop us travelling altogether as the survey also reveals that domestic overnight trips in Great Britain were up 5 per cent on last year, so we are still travelling and we are, it seems, attracted to the north.

As a caveat to that, before the north rises up to ridicule its friends in the south, figures based on just three months are far from a trend, so there is no need for the south to start soul searching just yet.

However, the boost in business during a traditionally quiet time will have been worth millions of extra pounds to northern economies providing a financial fillip to hundreds of rural and coastal businesses and communities that rely on tourism for their livelihoods.

This week marks the start of the UK summer holiday season, when the schools break up and we look forward to a week or two away. The figures for this period will make interesting reading when they finally appear but for now the north has definitely scored an early victory in the battle for our holiday spending money, to use a sporting analogy, it is one-nil up, but there is still a long way to go before it can be crowned champion.