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Culture
The Portsmouth city region’s cosmopolitan outlook and developing cultural scene makes the area a hot-bed for the unique output of a wide range of creative industries. It provides attractions such as history, music, festivals, museums, galleries and all you would expect from a thriving modern city region.
The literary heritage is inspiring, Portsmouth was the birthplace of Charles Dickens, the childhood home of Rudyard Kipling, the workplace of HG Wells and the city where Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his first Sherlock Holmes novel. Portsmouth City Museum is playing tribute to Arthur Conan Doyle with an interesting collection of material, including 40,000 artefacts. This exhibit establishes the city region as the key centre for Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes studies in the UK and internationally and expects to attract a total of 15,000 visitors in its first year.
The city region is home to one of the UK's premier touring music venues, The Wedgewood Rooms, as well as two superbly restored Victorian theatres – Kings Theatre and New Theatre Royal, who between them offer a diverse range of entertainment from comedy to contemporary theatre, opera to pantomime. A joint £20 million project by the University of Portsmouth and the New Theatre Royal is currently underway to extend the stage and improve the back-stage; this will attract additional UK theatre companies to the city and increase audience numbers.
On top of all this we have museums and monuments dedicated to the region’s historical roots such as the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard, the Submarine Museum, the Royal Marines Museum and the D-Day Museum with its magnificent Overlord Embroidery, the world’s longest embroidery of its kind. The Round Tower, originally built in 1418 by Henry V, still overlooks the Solent from Old Portsmouth, whilst Portchester Castle, sitting at the top of Portsmouth Harbour, is the finest example of a Roman fort in Northern Europe.
