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Theatre in Southern England: IntroductionDateline:15th April, 2001 The South West Arts region covers the unitary authorities of Bath and North East Somerset, Bristol City, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire and the Counties of Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire and Somerset. Its mission is to to make the arts central to the lives of people in the South West through information, organisations advocacy and funding. It provides grants totalling nearly £5 million a year to arts organisations and artists. For the purposes of this survey I'm keeping Somerset as one county, and the same for Gloucestershire, and keeping Bath and Bristol together in the old county of Avon. It just makes it easier! I've also added the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man to the end, although neither has anything to do with South West Arts (and, yes, the IoM would more properly have been dealt with alongside the North West): geographically the inclusion of the CI makes sense but the IoM doesn't. It's just a convenient from the writing point of view. The whole area is predominantly rural and/or touristy, although that was not always the case: tin-mining, for instance, was once a major industry. Much of the area is sparsely populated and it contains one of the wildest parts of England, Dartmoor, which is much more similar to the bleak Derbyshire moorland than to the Lake District which, for all its mountainous nature, is much less dangerous to the walker. The area of Dorset covered in this feature is the whole county except for the south east, which, as we saw last week, comes under the aegis of Southern Arts.
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