Borchester is a fictional town in the

BBC Radio 4 BBC Radio 4 is a British national radio station owned and operated by the BBC that replaced the BBC Home Service in 1967. It broadcasts a wide variety of Talk radio, spoken-word programmes, including news, drama, comedy, science and history fro ...

radio series ''

The Archers ''The Archers'' is a BBC radio drama on BBC Radio 4, the corporation's main spoken-word channel. Broadcast since 1951, it was famously billed as "an everyday story of country folk" and is now promoted as "a contemporary drama in a rural sett ...

''. It is the county town of the fictional county of Borsetshire. According to series tradition it is located 6 miles north-east of Ambridge in the Am Vale and is a historic market and

wool town A Wool town is a name given to towns and villages, particularly in Suffolk and north Essex, that were the centre of the Medieval English wool trade, woven cloth industry in the Middle Ages. They came to prominence when weavers from Flanders set ...

. These typically English country-town features are complemented by more modern additions, such as Underwoods (an upmarket department store), Jaxx bar, which was previously a café both managed by Kenton Archer, and Ambridge Organics, the shop run by Helen Archer, who also makes the Borsetshire Blue cheese sold in Underwoods.

Location

As ''The Archers'' is usually taken to "exist" in a region centred on

Evesham Evesham () is a market town and parish in the Wychavon district of Worcestershire, in the West Midlands region of England. It is located roughly equidistant between Worcester, Cheltenham and Stratford-upon-Avon. It lies within the Vale of Ev ...

and somewhere not too far from the

Malvern Hills The Malvern Hills are in the English counties of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and a small area of northern Gloucestershire, dominating the surrounding countryside and the towns and villages of the district of Malvern. The highest summit aff ...

and the edge of the

Cotswolds The Cotswolds (, ) is a region in central-southwest England, along a range of rolling hills that rise from the meadows of the upper Thames to an escarpment above the Severn Valley and Evesham Vale. The area is defined by the bedrock of Ju ...

, Borchester could be connected to Broadway,

Tewkesbury Tewkesbury ( ) is a medieval market town and civil parish in the north of Gloucestershire, England. The town has significant history in the Wars of the Roses and grew since the building of Tewkesbury Abbey. It stands at the confluence of the Ri ...

Pershore Pershore is a market town in the Wychavon district in Worcestershire, England, on the banks of the River Avon. The town is part of the West Worcestershire parliamentary constituency. At the 2011 census, the population was 7,125. The town is ...

. Hints in the series about the range of shops, local features and road layout, as well as distances sometimes given between Borchester, Felpersham and Ambridge, tend to point to Pershore as the most likely analogy, if we assume that Felpersham = Evesham. Another school of thought has Felpersham as Worcester and Borchester as

Droitwich Spa Droitwich Spa (often abbreviated to Droitwich ) is an historic spa town in the Wychavon district in northern Worcestershire, England, on the River Salwarpe. It is located approximately south-west of Birmingham and north-east of Worcester. The ...

. This view is supported by the existence of a Bishop of Felpersham - Evesham does not have a Bishopric whereas Worcester does. (At one time Bishop Cyril of Felpersham was an occasional character.) Although it is a county town, it is not a city. The nearby Felpersham, which might be based on Evesham, is the seat of a

Church of England The Church of England (C of E) is the established Christian church in England and the mother church of the international Anglican Communion. It traces its history to the Christian church recorded as existing in the Roman province of Britai ...

diocese and does have the

city status City status is a symbolic and legal designation given by a national or subnational government. A municipality may receive city status because it already has the qualities of a city, or because it has some special purpose. Historically, city status ...

that usually goes with it. Borchester has a by-pass, built with much controversy during the 1980s. Evesham and Droitwich Spa both have by-passes but not Pershore. The BBC published a map of Borchester in the 1990s, which, across a north-south axis common to both towns, was a ' cut and paste' of

west of the axis and

Great Malvern Great Malvern is an area of the spa town of Malvern, Worcestershire, England. It lies at the foot of the Malvern Hills, a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, on the eastern flanks of the Worcestershire Beacon and North Hill, and ...

to the east. A property company named Borchester Land has featured in the storyline for many years.

Facilities

Borchester is the location of the magistrates court for the area. Phil Archer served as a magistrate there for many years. In 1968, Nelson Gabriel, son of Walter Gabriel of Ambridge and a notorious rogue, was committed for trial and remanded in Gloucester prison at the Borchester magistrates. He returned many years later to run a wine bar in the town from 1980 to 1984. Also in Borchester is Borchester General Hospital. Borchester is the scene of frequent shopping trips and social encounters in the series. It has a mixture of trendy, "southern England" features such as wine bars and upmarket delis combined with some working-class neighbourhoods. The Grundy family lived for a while in a substandard council flat in Borchester after being evicted from Grange Farm in 2000.

References

{{The Archers Fictional populated places in England The Archers