Strewth! National newspaper says Bridport is “not much like Notting Hill at all”

BRIDPORT is featured today in The Times’ Great British Weekend series. The town is described by reporter Kate Quill as “very civilised” and “very attractive”.

The piece seems to be a kind of unofficial apology for a recent piece in The Sunday Times which revived the hopeless old crud about Bridport being “Notting Hill-on-Sea”:

In recent years Bridport has been hyped as a kind of Notting Hill-on-Sea: there’s a busy arts and food scene — Martin Clunes, Billy Bragg and P. J. Harvey have homes here — and there’s a lovely old cinema with the word “electric” in the title. But apart from all that, the comparison didn’t wash. There were no bankers, no yummy mummies, no hip hair salons, no designer boutiques and no coffee chains on every corner. By contrast, the town has a laid-back, intellectual and rather hippyish feel, with its second-hand bookshops and artists’ studios, such as the St Michael’s Studio complex and Sladers Yard Gallery in West Bay, on the Jurassic coast.

You can read the whole of The Times’ piece by clicking on this link. You might want to quibble with parts of it – whether Mr Clunes should actually be described as more of a Beaminster man; whether Bridport actually has just under 1,000 listed buildings, rather than just over 1,000; whether it’s right to give The Bull Hotel yet another recommendation – but it is definitely worth reading.

You can also – if you feel so inclined – read the piece in The Observer which I’m pretty sure first made the NH-on-Sea comparison by clicking on this link. It’s not a very good piece; I seem to remember at the time that the reporter who wrote it had to ring up various people mentioned in it to apologise. I think it was a victim of the poor misguided Observer’s craze for tediously referring to ”celebrities”.