The 2012 DH Lawrence Festival will run from the 6th to the 19th September, based at the Lawrence Heritage Centre in Eastwood. In addition to the Lawrence birthday lecture, to be given by Dr Andrew Harrison on September 11th, the writer's birthday, there is a varied programme of talks, walks and exhibitions. Full details can be found by following this link:
http://www.broxtowe.gov.uk/index.aspx?articleid=7025
This year's exhibition explores the controversy around the exhibition of Lawrence's paintings that was shown at the Warren Gallery in 1929, which led to the infamous police raid and the confiscation of many of the paintings on the grounds of pornography.
Note also that during the Festival the National Heritage Open weekend will allow access to several Lawrence-related properties in the district such as the Breach House and Beauvale Priory Farm which are not usually open to the public.
One important component of Lawrence's view from the Walker Street house was of Crich, a village on one of the first hills of Derbyshire, as seen from the Nottinghamshire border. In Sons and Lovers Paul Morel leads a party of family and friends on a hike from Alfreton via Crich to Ambergate:
At last they came into the straggling grey village of Crich. Beyond the village was the famous Crich Stand that Paul could see from the garden at home.
But the Crich Stand that they visited was not the tower we see today, built as a war memorial to the Sherwood Foresters after the Great War in 1923 (below). The hike described in Sons and Lovers is based on a real-life visit at Easter 1905, when Crich Stand was a shorter tower (above). Like its successor, this was built on the edge of Crich limestone quarry to take advantage of the magnificent view from its height of nearly 1,000 feet above sea level. As visitors still find, it is possible to see as far as Charnwood Forest in Leicestershire:
They saw the hills of Derbyshire fall into the monotony of the Midlands that swept away south.
