The Gloucestershire Blog

The Gloucestershire Portal was created by a local man who is intensly proud of the county and his home town of Gloucester. It started when I first started my company and was then SoftData and Virtual Gloucester. For those of you who would like a laugh and a bit of nostalgia you can still see the site on the Way Back Machine in May 1998 which is when archive.org first crawled the site.

Since then the site has gone through many updates until it now sites on it’s own domain that you see now. The current site consists of many pages about the county, Old Gloucester, Gloucester history, Forums for personal and business use, Streaming videos and our famous Gloucestershire Directory

The busiest sections are the forums and the directory. If you have any interest in the county at all, whether it is business or personal then our forums are for you.

My better half had a very painful accident on Friday, and on Saturday morning I had to take her to the  Accident and emergency unit in Gloucester.

I have to say that everyone there were kindness itself. A nurse saw Vanda hobbling in and quickly fetched a wheelchair for her. We were seen speedilly by a doctor, x rays were taken and Vanda was given a splint and crutches as well as a bag of pain killers.

Outside the unit when I fetched the car to take her home, she just couldnt manage to get into the front seat, and while she was struggling to get out an ambulance was trying to leave. The driver and medic, got out and helped her into the back seat. So, a very big than you to all of the staff at Gloucester Royal Hospital.

Gloucester council have been planting trees throughout the city, and today they have been adding annuals around the base of the planters. A brilliant idea.

Bluebells in Gloucestershire

The old theme on this blog has been up for a very long time now, so I thought I’d create a brand new one. Due to pressure at work this blog, and to a certain extent our forums have been neglected of late.

Hapilly, now that I have help in the office that should change.

Quay St Gloucester

It is good to see that after all the fuss there are now many community led library branches either open or about to open. Churchdown, Painswick and Mitcheldean are just a few. The Mitcheldean Library Action Group has now set up the new GL17 Community Hub to take on responsibility for the centre and is determined services will not be hit.

There has been a very vindictive and politically led campaign by the self styled “Friends of Gloucestershire Libraries”, that does them no credit at all. In particular on the tig site some of their comments have been particularly offensive. Continued denigrating comments about individual councillors seem to be their forte, and denigrating the wonderful volunteers who are giving their own time for the community also attract their bile.

It is past time these “protesters” started to look at the real world. The council does not have an unlimited pot of money and libraries simply must take their share of the cuts that are affecting everything in this terrible recession.

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I have always been fanatical about promoting Gloucester ( I was born here in this marvelous little city ) , and I’m proud to be involved with the latest ways of promoting our city.

The 4 Gates of Gloucester is a web site and magazine that are free, self funding and not for profit.

Set up and funded by City Centre businesses to share news, features and articles about our City, around our City. An independent social enterprise organisation, Four Gates has been created by Gloucester business and people, forGloucester businesses and people.

The regularly updated website and bi-monthly publication aims to build and enrich our City Centre .

It will also feature a listing for every city centre shop and business, something that is not available anywhere at all.

I’m also proud to be hosting the Believe in Gloucester website run by marketing Gloucester

Westgate St Gloucester

Although my original motive for publishing this site was just to promote this glorious area, I have always beleived it is important to give local business every opportunity to promote themselves without leaving the site a haven for spam. There are many ways you can help yourself here:

• Join our boards ( free of charge )
• We have a section “Tell us about your business” that you can use to advertise your services, again free of charge
• Astute posters will take part in the discussions here. So long as you have set up your profile, then every post leaves a link to your website.
• You can send every post you make to your twitter, facebook or Google + page with a single click
• Advertise with us - The best advertising rates in the county
• Make sure you are listed in our directory

It was such a wonderful sunny morning today, that I thought I’d take a walk and some photos of my daily walk to work from St Catherine’s Street, along Deans walk past the Dean’s Walk Inn, Pit Street, St Mary’s Street, under St Mary’s gate, past Gloucester Cathedral and into Westgate Street.

As a very young boy, I lived in Serlo Road with my grandparents, Nellie and Bill Knight, so the whole walk brings back very fond memories. As I was strolling along and taking photos I exchanged good morning greetings with locals and was heartened to see that Gloucester people are still the wonderful friendly folk they always were.

I met some people from the Cathedral and had a lovely chat about the changes over the years, which was very nice, but when I was photographing th Dean’s Walk Inn a lady came out and after the usual “What a lovely morning” it turned out that she still lives in the area and she once lived in Serlo Road herself. Not only that, but she knew my Grandparents ( 27 Serlo Road ) and lived next door to Mr Saddler who made such wonderful models made from match sticks.

I had a wonderful morning, and on Monday when I get the camera back to work I’ll post on our message boards and publish the photos as well.

It is marvelous to be in our new offices in Westgate St Gloucester. You can feel the buzz of the city with the bustle of shoppers passing by ouir office windows, and of course it is easy to pop out for a coffee or lunch.

The new office furniture is due here on the 28th, and Tammy Lynne will be coming the week after to take photos for us.