Old Post Office Belper

Over the years my work has entailed a lot of travelling in international destinations to provide consultancy and management support on larger projects. While in theory I have an office in Belper, no work other than checking the accounts is done there. We've got used to working from hotel rooms, construction sites, airport lounges and clients' offices. Our IT infrastructure used to be local server PC's with good network connections. We still have the relic machines sitting cold in the cellar of the Old Post Office. Now all of our work is in "The Cloud" of the Internet, all of our documents are held on the Servers of Amazon and Google. We can work from anywhere and access any document from any location with some form of Internet. All paper documents we receive are scanned and held on-line.  If we need to keep the original documents they are sent to secure remote storage. All photographs, project schedules, design plans and drawings are held in the internet for secu...

Every time there's a cloudburst in Belper, the heavy rain overwhelms the sewers in Bridge Street in Belper.  Belper was a much smaller place when the sewers were first installed. Our cellar door is below street level, there's a drain gully beside the door. This gully is on approximately the same level as the top of the sewer in the street outside. Normally this is not a problem, except when there's a cloudburst. The heavy rainfall overwhelms the capacity of the sewer to take away the water and it backs up into our cellar drain gully. This often floods the area outside our cellar door , which then floods the cellar. We've raised this with Severn Trent, the authority responsible for maintaining the sewer system. They've fitted a blocking valve in our drain gully to stop the backflow. This definitely helps in reducing the incidents, but it has not cured the problem. We still get flooding. Even six months or so, a different team from Severn Trent appears, pokes aro...

Recently I have become really annoyed with the service offered by the NatWest Bank They've closed the local Branches for no good reason. They claimed lack of business for Belper Branch that always seemed to have a queue. They've also closed their ATM. I've also had problems with their debit card, but more about that later. I've started looking around for an alternative, and purely by chance, I think I found it in the Belper branch of Wilko's, an ironmonger and household goods store! It will also reduce the costs of spending money when you are travelling overseas. I was buying an Easter present for my wife, but approaching the cashier desk, I saw a stand containing various gift and store cards. I don't know why, but one card caught my attention. It was the Revolut prepaid bank card . It had a VISA Logo on the package. It priced at £4.95, but given the problems with NatWest I thought it might be worth a try. There was not much detail on the packaging, but I p...

We're getting ready for the Pizza oven and BBQ season at the Old Post Office. We're hosting a meeting of the Belper BBQ/Pizza group , so we can't afford to be low on good dry hardwood for the oven. So it is off to Holly Grange Farm near Crich/Lea to our hardwood log supplier at  http://www.hardwoodlogsltd.co.uk/   to buy half a dozen bags of kiln dried Ash logs. (£5 each). which was soon loaded into our store. There'll soon be some crisp delicious pizza at No 127 Bridge Street.

One of the shops across the road from the Old Post Office sells good quality childrens' clothes. It is called Cheeky Bambini. If you are looking for Under-5 it is ideal.

The buildings for the old Post Office in Bridge Street, Belper were first built it was not a Post Office. It was built in 1805, we at war with the French Napoleonic Armies. Just 200 years before  51 Belper people had died in the Great Plague. The Post Office didn't have a network of public offices at that time, mail coaches probably called in at the George & Dragon Pub. The first adhesive postal stamp wasn't invented until 1837. It would be 1853 before the first mail post boxes were installed in Britain. In 1804 cotton workers would have started to use the newly rebuilt North Mill, previously destroyed by fire. The same type of bricks used in the North Mill floors are also present in some of the floors in the Old Post Office. The A6 Road as is now, between Belper and Matlock was opened as a Toll/Turnpike Road in 1837. Belper was the first place in Britain to get street gas lighting, the gas works was built in 1850. The first telephones in Belper were in 1895. Motor...