It’s time to celebrate as the momentous occasion of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee – 70 years on the throne – is celebrated over an extended bank holiday weekend.

Events are being held across four days in west Dorset as people come together to share this once-in-a-lifetime occasion.

Street parties are being organised and a whole host of other community events are planned.

Events include a Grand Jubilee Fayre in Burton Bradstock today, torchlight processions tonight to light beacons in Bridport and Lyme Regis, a picnic at Coneygar Hill tomorrow, Pirates Day in West Bay on Saturday and a Platinum Picnic in the Park at Bridport Millennium Green on Sunday.

While bunting is hung and businesses are decorated in Bridport, up above the town Paul Violet and his daughter Rebekah have been busy – illuminating all four faces of the Town Hall clock in a Union flag pattern in a striking display.

Bridport and Lyme Regis News:

Picture: Neil Barnes, Bridport and West Bay Photographer

 

Paul, the town’s cemetery superintendent, is also ‘keeper’ of the Town Hall clock, ensuring that it keeps good time. He has dedicated his work on the clock to his late father Ray, who died recently and loved the Royal Family.

Paul is also a member of the Bridport Heritage Forum, and to add to the celebrations, he and other members of the forum – Andy Violet, Fiona Ward and Tracey Dunford-Violet – have dressed the windows of the TIC with 1950s artefacts, photographs and clothes, which will bring back memories for many Bridport people, and visitors to the town, who “were there” when the ‘New Elizabethan’ era started.

Today’s civic events will see a proclamation by the mayor and town crier at 2pm in Bucky Doo Square –preceded by music from 11am by The Skalatans.

The lighting of the Jubilee Beacon will take place at 9.20pm tonight on Coneygar Hill.

Ian Bark, who has been elected mayor of Bridport for a third year, said: “I am delighted to see so many celebratory events for the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee organised by community groups and individual residents, complementing the town council’s civic contributions. Bridport is rightly recognising and celebrating the Queen’s long service to the nation and on behalf of the town I salute her for all she has achieved in the course of the last 70 years.”