Dorset Developments

Slowly, gradually, the utility works are crawling up the road not far from where my sister and her family live in Wimborne, causing angst and inconvenience to the residents of that part of the town as you must now describe an unlikely circuitous route in order to cross the ancient borough. The reason is that the sewers along the road have to be dug up and renewed, all the way from the town centre to the site of the new development on its outskirts, which will include the school my younger niece will eventually attend. The work is going to take months. 

My sister has lived in Wimborne ever since she left home. Her first house was a nice little starter-home she rather splendidly called Fat Tulips after a mid-1980s children's TV programme. Our parents also toyed with moving there for a long while and finally more than toyed - they had their possessions all boxed up when the sale fell through, and then my dad's dementia intervened: there's no compelling reason for mum to move at the moment. I worked in Wimborne for a time and worshipped at the Minster, which I've always liked. 

But my sister is having doubts. 'Do I want to stay here?' she mused after a busy few days at the start of the new school term. As well as the development described above, East Dorset District Council is planning on 1,100 new homes around the town, quite apart from what might be happening around the rest of the area. 'It's becoming hard to move around already, and there's all this development planned for a little medieval town that you can only get into across two bridges' (one of them being the beautiful Julian's Bridge, hence the picture at the top). 

Only a day or two before I was sat in a traffic queue in Surrey musing how nice it would be to retire to Dorset where things were a bit quieter. Admittedly I was thinking more of Bridport fifty miles to the west, but Bridport is getting very trendy these days. And is Wimborne, little, homely Wimborne, now really turning into an outpost of the crowded Southeast?