Kurt spends his time trotting the world seeking the finest. He’s a respected reviewer with over 20 years experience, so knows a thing or two about it and isn’t shy to give his opinion – Ed.
You can read the guidebooks till you are blue in the face and, even in a stay of weeks in as compact an area as this Island, you can stupidly pass up a small jewel of great price, hidden amongst the garish advertisements for manufactured ‘mass attractions’.
I should know better, at my age, but I still make mistakes of the kind. It took me until my third visit to Jersey to visit the fabulous Durrell zoo. And then I went only because I met Mrs Durrell at the races, and she invited me.
It is, of course, a zoo amongst zoos.
Ignorance is no excuse. Kurt
I don’t know anything about the history of photography. I know the name of Julia Margaret Cameron, because most of my books deal with the nineteenth century, but that is all. Or it was all.
Once again, it was a meeting with a lady that put me right. Would I like to come with her to a vernissage? Well, I’m a half-century habitué of vernissages, and they are very often drear and embarrassing, but on the principle that you might just hit a bull’s-eye, meet someone interesting, and anyway the wine is free, I still go.
And I got a bull’s-eye.
I imagine most islanders know about Dimbola Lodge, but how many have been there? It is a multiple joy.
Firstly, it is a delightful example of a Victorian house, sensitively restored and full of atmosphere. I have rarely seen more tasteful.
Secondly, it is not just empty rooms or clumps of old furniture that we might have seen in a second-hand shop. Dimbola devotes just one room – Mrs Cameron’s bedroom – to ‘recreating’ her home. The other rooms are devoted to exhibitions of art, and most particularly the art in which the lady made her name: photography.
Small is beautiful
What I like particularly is that the half-dozen rooms don’t hold just one show (how bored one can get traipsing through too many items of the same kind), but several. Starting with a fascinating exhibition of JMC’s own work.
That, being (like me) Victorian, I could have counted on liking, but there was more. I was particularly taken with a really stunning exhibition of Island photos “¦ mostly maritime “¦ the work of the Wightish Beken family of photographers. If I still had a spacious modern house, with big white walls, instead of my tiny, ageing bungalow, I’d have gone home with a bundle of the modern ones (for they are for sale)..
The Everest of photos
But the feature of the moment at Dimbola is an exhibition of photographs, by Charles Everest, of the famous 1970 Isle of Wight Pop Festival. And it, too, is quite something. Even to me — who had to ask which one was Jimi Hendrix, and to whom one singer ‘swallowing’ a mike is much like another – the photos ring with youthful exuberance and period excitement. For anyone who was there in 1970 – and it seemed most people at the vernissage had been — this exhibition is a fantastic journey back to an historic moment.
So much did this place ‘catch’ me, that I went back two days later. Fleeing a megapub doorstep, I descended on the charming Dimbola tea-room, consumed a civilised sandwich and a Fentiman’s ginger beer, and then looked at the whole thing again. Uncrowded, I liked it even better.
But Dimbola and its exhibitions deserve to be crowded. Places like this can’t survive without customers. And at four quid, it’s a giveaway. Any visitor reading this (and any local who may not have know): go! It’s great. And the tea-room is nice, too.
