Featured noticeboard: Bridport

We caught up the with the ‘Dorset Scouser’ to find out why a nice lad from the north is busy blogging, tweeting and notice-ing everything about the warm climes of Bridport.

I started by asking him to tell us about himself…….
My name is Stephen Banks and I’m a 22-year-old Liverpool-born Graphic Design graduate who moved to Bridport a year ago last week.

I work for a local PR agency, Watershed PR, where I handle work spanning social networking, web and graphic design, photography and video. We have a number of local clients, so we are very plugged-in to what’s going on around here.

I love covering local news events (especially if they’re visually interesting) and I always have a project on the go. At the moment, I am working on a series of time lapse starscape videos in and around Bridport, featuring landmarks such as the cliffs by the sea, a local café, the brewery and so on. Here is just a snippet of what I spend my evenings doing:Timelapse

Why did you set it up and who is involved?
The Bridport noticeboard was initially set up as a testbed for local news. There are several of us at Watershed who were and still are journalists: we have worked for the likes of The Sunday Times, BBC, The Observer, The Scotsman, Dorset Echo, Portsmouth News, Bridport News, and the sadly now defunct Paisley, Renfrewshire and Gryffe Weekly News. A number of us at Watershed would contribute and it would create a simple source of local information. Towns across the South West have really picked up and ran with social networking, and the online noticeboard concept is one that I can really see working well within Bridport.

We have also set up a number of offshoot noticeboards, such as bridportarts and bridportmusic to serve the lively cultural scene here. I tend to do a lot of the updating myself simply because I live right in the middle of the town – if something is happening, I know about it!

Tell us what the three best things about your location
The noticeboard mainly covers the town of Bridport, a mile inland from the World Heritage Site of the Jurassic Coast, in Dorset. This extends out to nearby villages such as West Bay, Symondsbury, Powerstock, Walditch, Shipton Gorge and so forth, with occasional dashes further afield to cover stories across West Dorset.

The three best things about the location are:
- the surprising range of art, music, theatre, literary and film events in the town (for example, comedian Jack Dee confirmed to appear at the Bridport Arts Centre). There are three theatres (The Electric Palace, The Bridport Arts Centre and The Lyric Theature), dozens of artists’ studios and live music venues, two literary festivals, a food and beer festival and even a hat festival.
- the location, being a stones throw from the spectacular Jurassic Coast. The standard of living around here is excellent and there is a real community feel to everything that goes on
- It’s a lot warmer down here than it is in Liverpool.
What do you hope to achieve with the noticeboard?
In time, I want this noticeboard to become a hub for local events and news. The coverage from the majority of local websites is sporadic at best. Many of these websites are difficult to update and maintain, whereas the n0tice system is pretty simple and intuitive.

In time, it would be good to bring in a few more people to cover the local stories. I’m only 22 myself and, having only lived in Bridport for a year, there would be a large amount of specific, historical or cultural information I would miss out on. A Bridport erudite, one who knows everything there is to be known about Bridport.

* Visit the Bridport noticeboard at http://bridort.n0tice.com.