A new hovercraft route is being trialed this summer – and has already proved popular with travellers.
A number of extra dates have been added for crossings this summer, meaning even more passengers can make their way to a sun-drenched UK island from just £12.
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A new hovercraft has been introduced this summer, with visitors able to visit a popular UK island in just 15 minutesCredit: AlamyOwing to the popularity of the new crossing, a number of extra dates have been added through the summerCredit: Getty
A brand new hovercraft route has been introduced connecting Hampshire to the Isle of Wight.
In just 15 minutes, travellers can journey from Lee-on-the-Solent to Ryde, soaring across the waters at speeds of 46mph and hovering 1.5m above the Solent.
Run by Hovertravel – the world’s oldest and longest-running hovercraft operator – the new route to the Isle of Wight is currently being trialled over the summer.
The crossings take place on the travel operator’s two-craft fleet: the Island Flyer and the Solent Flyer.
For those looking to book onto the high-speed crossing, an adult return ticket (16+) will set you back £24.
Seniors (60+) can snap up a crossing for £18.00 and children’s tickets (aged between 5-15 years) will cost £12.
Infants aged between 0 and 4 ride free on the hovercraft.
Crossings were originally planned for June 28, August 22 and September 5, but a number of extra dates have now been added thanks to the popularity of the new service.
Travellers can now book onto crossings on July 23, August 7 and August 21.
Departures take place twice a day, at both 10am and 3.25pm.
Return routes back from Ryde leave the island at 9.30am and 2.30pm.
Dates had also been extended to today, July 9, but at the time of publishing this article, The Sun found that the journeys could no longer be booked.
Hovertravel was established in 1965 and still provides the fastest way to cross the Solent, between Southsea in Portsmouth and Ryde.
David Hockney, the innovative and prolific British artist who arrived in Los Angeles in 1964, soon celebrating its sun-drenched life and landscapes in colorful, wildly popular paintings, has died.
He was 88.
Calling himself “an English Los Angeleno,” Hockney immortalized the city’s sparkling swimming pools, palm trees and beautiful young men, then went on to experiment with intricate photo collages, portrait suites, painted and filmed images of Yorkshire landscapes, iPad drawings and more.
Since his Pop Art paintings in the early ‘60s at London’s Royal College of Art, Hockney was rarely out of the limelight and, more important, rarely out of fresh ideas for how to draw, paint, film, print, photograph or otherwise express his creativity. The David Hockney Foundation owns more than 8,000 of his works, including about 200 sketchbooks, more than 230 self-portraits, opera designs and portraits of family and friends.
Hockney loved Hollywood — the people and the place — and liked to say he was brought up in England and Hollywood because of the time he spent at the movies. His peroxide blonde hair reportedly was inspired when he was a student and saw Clairol TV ads claiming “blondes have more fun.” But it was his interest in everything from Elvis Presley to the Hubble Space Telescope and his sense of humor that set him apart. Time Magazine art critic Robert Hughes once called him “the Cole Porter of modern art.”
He was open about being gay, even when homosexuality was outlawed in Britain. His early love affair with artist Peter Schlesinger, a younger man he met when teaching a summer drawing class at UCLA in 1966, inspired Hockney’s monumental 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures),” a centerpiece of Jack Hazan’s 1974 film “A Bigger Splash.” The painting’s 2018 auction at Christie’s drew a record $90 million for a living artist.
He was a dedicated reader and student of art, paying homage in his work to Picasso and Cubism as well as to Monet, Matisse, Van Gogh and Cezanne. A lover of opera, he often had it playing loudly in the studio and enjoyed taking visitors on curated car trips through the Hollywood Hills or Malibu while listening to Wagner. He designed sets for major companies in Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, London and elsewhere over the years, and some of his set models were later shown in museums.
David Hockney’s work “Gregory in the Pool (Paper Pool 4)” is part of his solo exhibition “David Hockney: Perspective Should Be Reversed” at the Palm Springs Art Museum in Palm Springs. (Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)
(Courtesy of the Palm Springs Art Museum)
His solo shows drew enormous crowds to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as early as 1988. In 2017 a major retrospective of his work, keyed to his 80th birthday, was presented at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paris’ Centre Pompidou and London’s Tate Modern. Chronicling Hockney’s arrival as an important artist in the “ravishing” Met retrospective, the New Yorker writer Andrea K. Scott called it “a revelation.” It was, she wrote, “a retort to all the eye-rollers,” including herself, who dismissed his work “as, at best, a guilty pleasure.”
In 2012 he received the coveted Order of Merit, which Queen Elizabeth II presented to him at Buckingham Palace.
David Hockney was born the fourth of five children to a working-class family in Bradford, Yorkshire, on July 9, 1937. He has said he started “making marks on paper” at 8 and received private painting lessons before moving on to Bradford School of Art in 1953. The first painting he sold was a portrait of his father in 1955. He attended the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 until his graduation in 1962 and received the school’s Gold Medal.
After college he did not slack off, noted his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. In his 2014 book, “Hockney: The Biography,” Sykes pointed out that the artist’s first flat had a chest of drawers near the bed on which he had painted, in large capital letters, the words “get up and work immediately.”
David Hockney in 2017.
(Catherine Opie, Courtesy of Regen Projects, Los Angeles and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong and Seoul.)
Hockney lived by that command for the rest of his life, turning out canvas after canvas, photo after photo. In the ‘80s came his extraordinary multi-image photographic collages of friends including writer Christopher Isherwood and artist Don Bachardy and such landmarks as the Brooklyn Bridge, Grand Canyon and Pearblossom Highway.
“The Polaroids started oddly enough when I’d just finished a long period of work in the theater, which is of course playing with perspective and illusion,” he once told The Times. “People say, ‘You are a painter, and photography is a sideline.’ But nothing is a sideline for me.”
That included his continuing fascination with technology. The artist’s long career swept in artworks made not only on cameras and canvases, but on such things as fax machines and photocopiers. Hockney liked to experiment, whether it was with state-of-the-art printing devices or centuries old painting techniques. He went several times to a show of portraits by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres at London’s National Gallery in 1999 and was greatly taken with the photographic’ quality of Ingres’ 19th century drawings. Certain that Ingres had used something optical to achieve that quality, Hockney bought himself a camera lucida, a small device that works like a prism. He then applied Ingres’ methods–as Hockney imagined them–to his own portraits of friends and family, and in 2001, he published “Secret Knowledge,” exploring his theories on early artistic uses of optical devices.
His death was confirmed by the Associated Press and New York Times.
A NEW hovercraft route is being trialled in the UK this summer – and could be made permanent.
Bookings are now open for the 15-minute trip, with tickets starting at just £12.
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Visitors will fly at speeds of 46mph along the new crossingCredit: AlamyThe 15-minute trip will take visitors to the UK’s sunniest destinationCredit: Alamy
Hampshire and the Isle of Wight will now be connected through a brand new hovercraft crossing, taking place all throughout the summer.
Run by Hovertravel – the world’s oldest and longest-running hovercraft operator – travellers will now be able to make the journey from Lee-on-the-Solent to Ryde in just 15 minutes.
Visitors will soar at speeds of 46mph, while hovering 1.5m above the Solent, on the company’s two- craft fleet: the Island Flyer and the Solent Flyer.
Crossings will take place on June 28, August 22 and September 5, with two departures daily.
