Borchester

Borchester

Borchester is a fictional town in the BBC Radio 4 radio series "The Archers". It is the county town of the fictional county of Borsetshire. According to series tradition it is located 6 miles north-east of Ambridge in the Am Vale and is an historic market and wool town. These typically English country-town features are complemented by more modern additions, such as Underwoods (an upmarket supermarket chain, possibly modelled on Waitrose) and Ambridge Organics, the shop run by Helen Archer. [ [http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/whos_who/characters/who_ambridgeorganics.shtml BBC Radio 4 The Archers - Borchester] ]

As the Archers is usually taken to "exist" in a region centred on Evesham and somewhere not too far from the Malvern Hills and the edge of the Cotswolds, Borchester could be connected to Broadway, Tewkesbury or Pershore. Hints in the series about the range of shops, local features and road layout, as well as distances sometimes given between Borchester, Felpersham and Ambridge, tend to point to Pershore as the most likely analogy, if we assume that Felpersham = Evesham. Another school of thought has Felpersham as Worcester and Borchester as Droitwich Spa. This view is supported by the existence of a Bishop at Felpersham - Evesham does not have a Bishopric whereas Worcester does.

Although it is a county town, it is not a city. The nearby Felpersham, which might be based on Evesham, is the seat of a Church of England diocese and does have the city status that that usually implies. Borchester has a by-pass, built with much controversy during the 1980s. Evesham and Droitwich Spa both have by-passes but not Pershore.

The BBC published a map of Borchester in the 1990s, which, across a north-south axis common to both towns, was a 'cut and paste' of Evesham west of the axis and Great Malvern to the east.

Borchester is the location of the magistrates court in the area. Phil Archer served as a magistrate there for many years. In 1968, Nelson Gabriel, one of the most famous characters in The Archers, and a notorious rogue, was committed for trial and remanded in Gloucester prison at the Borchester magistrates. He returned many years later to run a wine bar in the town from 1980 to 84.

Borchester is the scene of frequent shopping trips and social encounters in the series. It has a mixture of trendy, "southern England" features such as wine bars and upmarket delis combined with some working class neighbourhoods. The Grundy family lived for a while in a substandard council flat in Borchester after being evicted from Grange Farm in 2000.

References


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