It has entered the 21st century – but only just
What’s going for it? There’s a photo, an actual physical photo, of me – aged what, five? – standing atop Gold Hill in Shaftesbury on some roasting, golden afternoon in what, 1976? This was peak Shaftesbury season. Gold Hill had been beamed into everyone’s living room for years thanks to That Hovis Advert, directed by Ridley Scott (recently resurrected for the digital age), and everyone wanted to be seen there. These days it would be selfies and photobombs ricocheting through people’s Instagrams. In the 70s, we queued up quietly with our Polaroids. Odd, isn’t it, how an advert for bread seared itself on to the collective psyche? We didn’t have TikTok and billions of platforms to divert us back then, of course, so it was impossible to avoid. But there must also have been something reassuring, calming, medicating about the sepia-tinted sight of cobbles and thatch in the mid-70s, when Britain, like today, was going through yet another of its periodic, post-imperial nervous breakdowns. Shaftesbury, high on its hill, was ignored by the Industrial Revolution, bypassed by the railways, so its streetscape to this day has an air of the feudal, even Saxon past. It has entered the 21st century, but only just: shops such as Box of Allsorts take me right back to my childhood. Perching at the top of timeless Gold Hill again, gazing over the countryside below, however cheesy, is just the pulse-cooler I need in these feverish times.
The case against Off the beaten track but, perhaps, in an appealing way. Pricey. But everywhere’s pricey in Dorset.
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