Shaftesbury’s Gold Hill is a magnet for visitors and one of the most famous and photographed streets in Britain. It appears in countless guides and is generally believed to have been launched on an unsuspecting universe via a 1973 television advert for Hovis bread. The advertisement was an early directing endeavour by Ridley Scott before he went on to make more trivial efforts, such as ‘Alien’ and ‘Gladiator’. The Hovis commercial is known as ‘The Bike Round’ or ‘the Boy on the Bike’. A young boy wearing a flat cap pushes a bread-laden bicycle up a steep cobbled street, while a narrator, apparently the boy in old age, reminisces about taking bread ‘to the top of the world’ to a soundtrack brass band playing part of Dvořák’s New World Symphony. In the 19th century, though, Shaftesbury’s industries having been killed off by competition from the new industrial towns of the north and midlands, it was a shabby, impoverished, place. Doubtless, the Boy on the Bike has brought thousands of spending visitors to Shaftesbury and, in celebration of this, a giant plastic Hovis loaf has been placed at the top of Gold Hill.
However, at the end of the day Gold Hill is simply a wonderfully picturesque old cobbled street with traditional cottages on one side, the (probably 14th century) buttressed precinct wall of Shaftesbury Abbey on the other and a fabulous view of Blackmore Vale at the end. There is an excellent museum at the top of the hill.