Budleigh Past and Present

Barry & Janice Webb from Worcestershire said that the book sale was “the best deal in Budleigh”  The Grand Book Sale on 28 June raised around £500 for the Museum. Organisers declared themselves delighted with the result. The event coincided with the Budleigh Hospicare Open Gardens event. Some of the visitors who had come to admire the flowers went away with some very good book bargains.   A permanent shelf of secondhand books is now in place in the Museum Shop.               Another happy book-hunter: the smile says it all    

From time to time I've been asked by the Budleigh Salterton Literary Festival organisers to give a tour of the town's landmarks associated with creative people of the past and present who've lived or who are living in Budleigh. That includes writers, artists, musicians and scientists.  A bit of exercise is involved with some uphill stretches, but there are good views to make up for that, and sometimes some benches. When I've done this sort of thing in the past, people asked if there was a book or leaflet where all that information was written down. Well, there isn't really! So I thought I'd have a go here, but focusing on writers who have used Budleigh Salterton as a setting for their novels or who've described it in their memoirs. Many writers have mentioned Budleigh Salterton or a similar name evoking it, among   the most famous being Noel Coward and J.K. Rowling. If, like me, you think this is one of the most romantic...

Adam Bunch is a man on a mission. If you happen to be in Budleigh, or Exeter, or Oundle, or any one of more than a dozen places in Britain that he’s been touring this summer you might be lucky enough to find one of these little postcards that he’s left in strategic positions. Modern To ronto's skyline from the harbour  Image credit: Wikipedia and Jeangagnon  They’re all part of a grand project that he’s dreamt up to let as many people as possible know about the origins of his home city of Toronto. The project, appropriately enough is called Toronto Dreams, and the postcards have been specially created to let the reader imagine what life might have been like a few centuries ago for one of the pioneering figures of Canada’s history. Regular readers of my blog will know that I’m talking about John Graves Simcoe (1752-1806), the first Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, who was responsible for building T oronto though it was called Y ork in those da...