Budleigh Past and Present

    Fairlynch Museum volunteers gave a warm welcome to Canadian Adam Bunch, left, including an evening at East Budleigh’s Sir Walter Raleigh pub You probably won’t have come across Adam Bunch unless you picked up one of the hundreds of little postcards that he left around the town to make us reflect on events more than 200 years ago – a bit like a Banksy historian. You see, Adam is a proud and passionate Canadian with a special interest in his home city of Toronto. And, unlikely though it may seem, Budleigh has a link to the city and its province of Ontario through a former resident of our town. General John Graves Simcoe, born in Northamptonshire in 1752, is revered in Canada for many reasons.  As Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada for five years from 1791, he founded Toronto and was instrumental in ending slavery in North America. He also introduced institutions such as the courts, trial by jury, English common law and freehold land tenure. And to prove what a c...

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...