Category: Copy Writing

The best places to celebrate Cheshire Day across my home region

To mark Cheshire Day, I was commissioned by Marketing Cheshire to write a guest blog post for their public-facing website for visitors.

The blog includes references to some of the attractions across the region from Chester via Crewe to Macclesfield with its former Art Deco cinema turned food court [pictured above].

Here’s a taster of the text:

March 30 marks the date the county was given its own Charter of Liberties by King Edward I in 1300 — in effect its very own Magna Carta.

Wiley Cheshire had managed to agree its own, separate charter to the 1215 document, designed to prevent the king from exploiting his power, thanks to Ranulf le Meschin, the hard-bargaining, third Earl of Chester.

And, while the exact date is subject to some debate, it reflects the long history of Cheshire as a place of national status.

Read the full post via the Marketing Cheshire blog

I’m available for content writing and gust blog posts.

Jodrell Bank: travel content for the Boundless magazine centenary issue

Boundless is the magazine for nearly a quarter of a million members of Boundless, the travel, motoring and leisure club for the public sector.

The latest issue celebrated the centenary of the organisation and I contributed some travel features, exploring sites of major events over the decades — now turned tourist attractions.

One of them was Jodrell Bank [pictured above]. Read more …

When the Soviet Union launched the Sputnik One satellite in 1957, it lit the blue touchpaper for the international space race.

This paved the way for America’s Apollo space programme and fuelled cold-war tensions between Russia and the West.

But the new world order also made an unlikely hero of a science-loving boffin at a rural Cheshire outpost.

Sir Bernard Lovell founded Jodrell Bank after WWII to pioneer work on radar.

By 1950, his team had detected the nebula in Andromeda and, as the space race intensified, Jodrell’s landmark Lovell Telescope was charged with tracking Russian cosmonauts.

Today that Grade I-listed telescope sits at the heart of the Jodrell Bank Discovery Centre, the observatory and science park set amid Cheshire farmland.

Jodrell Bank has come a long way since its post-war origins, earning a place on the UNESCO World Heritage list and hosting the annual Bluedot music festival, but it remains true to Sir Bernard’s space-race vision.

Read more at Boundless, March/April 2023.

Chester croquet: parenting blog content for Care for the Family

We had come to our local park for a hands-on class in the burgeoning sport of golf croquet, a faster, T20 cricket-style take on the traditional Association Croquet game.

The key difference is that golf croquet has one stroke per turn and, when a hoop is scored, all players move onto the next.

We arrived to find Mark Lloyd of the Chester Croquet Club [logo above] marking the flat, grass court with six cast-iron hoops and a central peg set firmly into the ground.

Mark, a regular club player with over thirty years of experience and a former world ranking of 230, had played some hard-fought matches in his time.

But was he ready for two truculent teenagers and their non-sporting father, the latter perennially the last person to be picked for any school sports team?

Handing out four coloured balls and mallets, Mark appeared to be taking it in his stride.

‘For me,’ he explained as we hit a few warmup shots and tried running a few hoops, ‘croquet is all about strategy.”

I’m always thinking three balls ahead. That’s why it’s a mix of snooker, boules, and chess.’

Read the full story via the Care for the Family Parenting blog, One dad, two teenagers and a new sport.

Content writing: a must-visit guide to Dr Who locations for Visit Wales

My latest content-writing assignment was commissioned by the agency Orchard for Visit Wales.

It was an update of shooting locations for the Dr Who TV series, timed as the producers hand over the keys of The Tardis to new doctor Ncuti Gatwa.

Here’s a sample of the copy:

The list of Doctor Who sites evolves as The Doctor regenerates through new incarnations.
While Jodie Whittaker was handing over the keys to the Tardis, South Wales provided the several backdrops to her final series, Flux.

Previously, Southerndown Beach, the shingle beach located along the Wales Coast Path in Glamorgan, had featured. It’s officially known as Dunraven Bay.

However, the wave-washed beach, popular with fossil hunters, is better to known to Whovians — that’s Dr Who fans — as Bad Wolf Bay.

It played a starring role in several episodes, the most dramatic scene the tearful farewell between Doctor David Tenant and companion Rose Tyler (Billie Piper) [pictured above] in Doomsday.

Read the full content: Follow the TARDIS to top Dr Who locations.