About chilbolton.news
The idea for this website arose during December 2024, after a rather lively meeting which announced plans for 150 new homes in our village. We were told that these plans had been extensively prefigured in Parish Council minutes and also in the Parish Magazine.
This all came as something of a surprise, not only to us but also to many of our fellow residents. We wondered to ourselves “if we could miss something as big as an estate of 150 homes, what else could we be missing?”
We decided that the best way to fill this information gap was to become more familiar with what was happening in the village, particularly the Parish Council. And rather than keep our new-found knowledge to ourselves we would try and share it with our neighbours.
Our aim for chilbolton.news is to report on what is happening quickly and where necessary explain what it means. We will press for openness and clarity, so that everyone in the village has the chance to make good decisions on what is best for us all.
We have lived in Chilbolton for thirty years and raised our two daughters here. We don’t intend to move away from here, so what we can do to make things better, we will do.
Jane and Finian O’Boyle
The Village of Chilbolton
Most people reading this will live in Chilbolton, or nearby. For those who don’t, Chilbolton is a village in the Test Valley in Hampshire, United Kingdom. There are some 450 homes in the village, with around 900 residents.
Stocks Green in Chilbolton, Hampshire
We are lucky to have a church, a shop and a pub. Our main street is dotted with thatched cottages. We have beautiful water meadows and common land, and the river Test, an internationally-acclaimed chalk stream runs through it.
This is not to say that we don’t face challenges. In such a desirable village, house prices are high. Young people who grow up here are often forced to move away for work, or because they can’t afford to live here.
Over the years the village has grown, but the infrastructure that supports it has lagged behind. We often have flooding when the waste water systems cannot cope.
Chilbolton is a wonderful place to live, but it needs effort to keep it so wonderful.
Behind the Scenes
For those curious about how this site has been put together, the backbone is provided by the Hugo site generator, together with the Dart-Sass CSS extension language. It uses a custom responsive theme, originally based on roadster which itself is a fork of the popular mainroad theme.
Supporting them are versions of the admonitions module for notes and alerts, and the Pagefind static search library.
All of this software is available under an open source licence. As with everything in computing, we stand on the shoulders of giants.