Real stories, real people, real West Country
Fishing nets, plastic bottles, tangled rope and industrial detritus — the West Country coastline collects more than its share of the world's waste. A growing movement of artists is hauling that rubbish up the beach and turning it into something that makes people stop, stare and think twice.
Across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset, village post offices are disappearing one by one — and the communities left behind are furious. We spoke to the postmasters, the regulars and the campaigners who say losing the post office isn't just an inconvenience. It's the beginning of the end.
They swapped city salaries for chicken coops, commuter trains for compost heaps, and rental flats for a few acres of West Country mud. Meet the young families who've made the leap to smallholding life — and are figuring out, one bruising season at a time, what self-sufficiency actually means.
When the shutters came down in 2020, nobody was entirely sure they'd go back up again. For hundreds of pubs, clubs, and small theatres across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset, the pandemic wasn't just a pause — it was a near-death experience. We spent time with the venue owners, musicians, and regulars who fought to keep live music alive in the South West, and found out what it really cost them.
Across Devon, Somerset, Cornwall, and Dorset, a growing number of gardeners are doing something that would have scandalised their neighbours a decade ago — letting things get a bit messy on purpose. Native plants, pollinator patches, and food-growing corners are replacing the manicured lawn, and the movement is spreading faster than bindweed in a heatwave. We met the people leading the charge.
Forget London's postcode lottery for arts funding — a new wave of independent filmmakers across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset, and Dorset is quietly building something remarkable. They're making bold, original work on tight budgets, attracting serious investment, and proving that the best British stories don't always start in Soho. We went behind the scenes to find out how they're doing it.
On the windswept heathlands above Exmoor, one man and his flock of Exmoor Horn ewes are doing something no rewilding project has yet managed — keeping a fragile ecosystem breathing. But the conservationists don't always see it that way, and that's where things get complicated.
From Poldark's clifftops to Broadchurch's seafront, the West Country has spent years quietly doubling as everywhere from Victorian Cornwall to fictional Dorset towns. We went behind the scenes to find out what it's actually like when a film crew moves in — and what happens when they leave.
Somewhere between a WhatsApp group and a barn door, a different kind of food economy is quietly flourishing across Devon, Cornwall, and Somerset. It's local, it's personal, and it exists largely outside the gaze of the supermarkets — and sometimes, the regulators too.
The government says go electric, the adverts make it look effortless, and your neighbour just got a shiny new EV on the driveway. But out here in the West Country, where charging points are rarer than a warm January and the nearest motorway services is a forty-minute drive, the gap between the sales pitch and lived reality is hard to ignore.
Tucked behind vestry doors and beneath choir loft stairs, hundreds of forgotten books are quietly crumbling in West Country parish churches. Former librarian Margaret Holt has made it her retirement mission to find them, catalogue them, and drag them back from the brink — one dusty shelf at a time.
Deep in a Somerset village, a dormant bakehouse has been coaxed back to life by one determined baker who thinks the industrial loaf is one of the great quiet disasters of modern British life. She's not just baking bread — she's rebuilding a food culture, one slow ferment at a time.
For over thirty years, Exeter-based photographer Della Marsh has been quietly building one of the most remarkable visual archives the West Country has ever produced. From sheep markets in Hatherleigh to harvest suppers in the Blackdown Hills, her lens has caught a way of life that nobody else thought to save. Now she's on a mission to make sure the next generation keeps watching.
Somewhere in a Devon farmhouse, an 84-year-old man is describing the way his grandfather used to call the cows in — and a linguist with a digital recorder is hanging on every syllable. Meet the archivist quietly building a sound library that could save centuries of West Country speech from disappearing without a trace.
In a ramshackle studio on the edge of a Cornish village, a retired potter is pulling centuries-old techniques back from the brink — one lump of clay at a time. Margaret Treloar spent decades watching traditional ceramics get swallowed up by factory lines and fast homeware, and she's decided she's had quite enough of it. Now she's passing on what she knows to a new generation before the old ways disappear entirely.
Deep in a Somerset barn that smells of old oil and older stories, Ray Calloway is doing something quietly extraordinary — rescuing motorcycles and classic cars that everyone else gave up on. Each machine that rolls in carries a history, and Ray feels honour-bound to uncover it.
In the flint-walled towers of rural Dorset, a small but fiercely dedicated band of ringers is fighting to keep one of England's oldest musical traditions from falling permanently silent. We spent a Tuesday evening with one of the county's most passionate campanologists to find out what it actually takes to keep the bells ringing — and why it matters more than most of us ever stop to think.
Tucked behind a market town high street in Somerset, a working letterpress studio is doing something quietly radical — teaching young creatives to slow down. We visited the printer who's spent three decades refusing to let moveable type become a museum piece.
In a cluttered studio on the edge of Dartmoor, textile artist Rachel Penhaligon is doing something quietly radical — turning scraps of forgotten industrial cloth and centuries-old weaving traditions into art that stops people dead in their tracks. Her work isn't just beautiful. It's a rescue mission.
In a yard tucked behind a Purbeck village, master stonemason Ray Holbrook is doing something quietly radical — teaching a new generation to read the grain of stone the way their great-grandparents once did. His apprenticeship scheme is small, unhurried, and possibly one of the most important things happening in the West Country right now.