Free Word Competitors

The Southbank Centre is the UK’s largest arts centre and the heart of London’s cultural life. We exist to present great cultural experiences that bring people together and we achieve this by providing the space for artists to create and present their best work and by creating a place where as many people as possible can come together to experience bold, unusual and eye-opening work. We want to take people out of the everyday, every day. Occupying a prominent riverside location that sits in the midst of London’s most vibrant cultural quarter on the South Bank of the Thames, our site has an extraordinary creative and architectural history stretching back to the 1951 Festival of Britain. The Southbank Centre is made up of the Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and Hayward Gallery as well as being home to the National Poetry Library and the Arts Council Collection. It is also home to six Resident Orchestras (Aurora Orchestra, Chineke! Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra, London Sinfonietta, Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Philharmonia Orchestra).

In 1799 William Wordsworth arrived in Grasmere aged 29, largely unknown and writing innovative poetry in a new style. Whilst living at Dove Cottage with his family, Wordsworth wrote many of his greatest poems and his sister Dorothy kept her insightful Grasmere journal. Visit Wordsworth Grasmere and discover the story of this remarkable time in his life. As well as Dove Cottage and the other historic buildings at Wordsworth Grasmere, we look after a unique collection of works by Wordsworth and the other writers and artists of the Romantic period. At the heart of this collection are the manuscripts that Wordsworth’s descendants gave to the Wordsworth Trust in 1935 so that they could remain here, where they were largely written and inspired. This is one of the things that make Wordsworth Grasmere so special. It is very unusual to find the original works of such a major writer at the very place with which he or she is most associated.

Transforming lives by getting children and families reading.