News & Events

Ilminster Network Event Report - Developing the local Tourism 'offer'

(Ilminster)

This Network Event focussed on the things that towns can do to improve the tourism 'offer' - making towns more attractive to visitors.

It covered the provision of visitor information (specifically looking at good examples of Information Centres), developing projects that interpret local heritage, and also two examples of major events - The Ilminster Midsummer Experience and Frome hosting the start of a stage of the Tour of Britain.

If you would like to view the presentations, see below. I can thoroughly recommend viewing the Cobble Wobble video!

It was one of our best attended events, with 32 delegates, some coming from Coleford in Gloucestershire and Wareham in Dorset.

We took two groups on a tour of the town and returned to the venue for presentations.  Below you can find a link to all four of the presentations shown.

We began with the tour - which took in the town centre, showing the Market House, the now one-way Ditton Street and 20mph zone, the plethora of quality independent shops and Ilminster's fine buildings.

Ilminster_centre

We stopped briefly to look at the Meeting House, a much-loved venue, cafe, shop and Tourist Information point, and also the Tesco store and car park.

ilminstertour

After a lengthy climb up to and into the Dillington Estate, delegates stopped by a WWII pillbox and tank traps and were told about the Stop Line, the defence line designed to deter any Nazi invasion in Devon or Cornwall moving eastwards. Interpretation boards for this form part of the Old Railway Heritage project (see the presentation below).

Test picture

Delegates were impressed by the history and the boards and wanted to find out more about the Stop Line.

Back at the Minster Rooms we had the following presentations (click to download, all files are pdf's less than 2mb);

Information Centres  Information Centres presentation with text
- link to Kingsbridge Information Centre website
- link to Porlock Visitor Centre website

The Old Railway Heritage Project

The Ilminster Midsummer Experience

Frome hosts the Tour of Britain  We also had some observations after the event from Frome TIC TIC perspective on ToB

Cobble Wobble video - excellent video showing what happened in Frome the night before the Tour of Britain stage started in Frome...

We also mentioned the South Somerset Market Towns Visitor Audit which is an excellent piece of work - Visitor Audit

Unfortuneatly we ran over during these presentations and decided to change the Q&A session to questions to the presenters over lunch.

Observations - I think everyone was impressed by what Sue Wilthew had achieved in four months in the run up to the Tour of Britain and how she involved both young people and local businesses. Also the dedication and ambition of the Ilminster Midsummer Experience team and the lessons they learnt were really useful. The Old Railway Heritage project has been a success thanks to partnership working between Town and Parish Councils and other volunteers; it has a lot of potential still as it's not been widely promoted yet (something common to many local heritage projects that have wider appeal).

We received some good feedback at this event; and many suggestions and much advice was discussed between the delegates over lunch. We look forward to strengthening links with our town equivalents in Dorset and Gloucestershire.

Many thanks to the Ilminster Forum team for hosting the event, SSDC for funding it and the South Somerset Officers for helping on the day.

Created on September 24th 2009

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