The Blandford Blog

The local chicken factory, located just outside of town in Oakford Fitzpaine has announced it will be closing on 1 September 2007.

The factory employs around 120 people, mostly from Blandford, and it will be a big blow to the area. Jobs are few and far between in Blandford and another 120 people looking for work will only make things worse.

The local MP blames the government for the factory closing, as it could not compete with overseas competition that do not have the same restrictions placed on them as the British poultry industry has.

The local brewery, won’t name them here, are proposing to build a more modern brewery on the site of their old soft drinks complex.

This will free up land where their current brewery is. Using this land, and the adjacent unused land, they intend to build 200 houses.

All very nice, but the adjacent unused land is unused for a reason. It’s a flood plain! Each winter, every time it rains heavy the land gets covered in 3 feet of river water.

I thought the government had stopped the building of homes on flood plains, if they haven’t they ought to!

The County Council have applied to the lottery for £1.9 million to help build a state of the art library for Blandford.

If they get the grant it will go towards building a brand new library on their site in west street. This will replace the rather cramped library in The Tabernacle.

For me it will mean a 15 minute walk to the library, instead of the current two minute walk. The will be no hardship and if we get a better library then it will be worth it.

According to the council, the new library will have every facility a library could want. But it all depends on getting the grant from the lottery.

Don’t hold your breath, the site on west street is a patch of waste ground that has had a sign on it saying “Site of the new Blandford Library” since 1998. Nothing has been done to the site in ten years

Blandford, according to the Dorset Data Book 2006, has a population of 8,910 with the number of dwellings being 4,434.

Not sure if this includes the Army camp which is about 1 mile out of town and, currently, home to The Royal Signals Regiment. The camp has around 3,000 military and civilian personnel, and is without doubt the biggest employer in the town.

Unfortunately, the MOD want The Royal Signals to move to Wales, and has said they will. This will devastate the town in terms of employment, but we are hoping that another regiment will move into the camp and keep the civilians in employment. It will be a devastating blow if the camp closes altogether.

There will be more posts about the camp in the future, I’m sure of this as it is such a big part of the town.

I won’t go into the full story here, but if you want to read more about it take a look at the announcement page.

Basically, the once thriving Blandford Blog suffered a crash and everything was lost. The only thing left of the old blog is the original template, which I am reusing again for the new Blandford Blog.

Please don’t leave comments pointing me to the many free, modern blog templates that are available these days. I will continue to use the old template as a sort of memorial to the old Blandford Blog.

Blandford Forum is a small town in Dorset, on the map it is roughly half way between Bournemouth and Salisbury. In, what is locally called “The middle of nowhere”.

The town sits on the banks of the river Stour and probably was built because this is where the old roads from Salisbury to Dorchester and Poole to Shaftesbury met and crossed the river. As was usual in old England, where ever roads met, or crossed rivers a town or village was bound to spring up.

Blandford is one of the best preserved Georgian towns in England. Although its history goes back much further than the 1700’s, there are only two building in the town that predates 1731. This was the year of “The Great Fire” which destroyed the entire town, leaving only two buildings standing.

As a result of this, the buildings in the center of the town, or the old part of the town as it has grown considerably over the year, all date between 1735 and 1760.

As you move out from the centre of town the building get newer, until at the edges of the town the houses are only a few years old.

Well, that gives a brief outline of the town’s history. Future posts, I hope, wil be a mixture of current evens in and around the town, with a some historical posts thrown in for interest.