Popular garden and leisure retailer The Range is opening a new store in Cheltenham. Over the last couple of months people have flocked to the DIY store for bits and bobs and now shoppers will have a new and improved store to visit when it opens in October.
When it comes to eating out in Gloucestershire you are never short on choice, with everything from Italian and Green to Chinese and French. And over the years a number of new restaurants and pubs have popped up in and around the county. However sadly along the way we have lost some of our favourite food haunts. So we asked Gloucestershire Live readers which restaurants they missed the most and which ones they would bring back if they could and they didn't hold back. There were more than 700 responses and here are just a few that just kept popping up: Flynn's Bar and Brasserie, Cheltenham The Orange Tree, Cheltenham
From teaching a 90-year-old woman how to use Skype and teaching total beginners through a screen, life has changed big time for one music teacher. Simon Probert, 45, lives in Tewkesbury but he teaches piano and keyboard all over Gloucestershire, including in Behall Infant School in Cheltenham for eight years. He started playing piano himself when he was just 8, but ended up reading political history at the Royal Holloway, University of London.
Almost a quarter of Gloucestershire's working age population have been furloughed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic. According to GFirst LEP figures, the number of working 16 to 64-year-olds on the Government's Job Retention Scheme is 93,400 up to the end of July. That's 24.3 per cent of the county's Gloucestershire's working age population. Gloucestershire has a working age population of 384,356 people, and 93,400 of those were furloughed up to the end of July - an increase of 4,000 to the end of June and 17,000 to the end of May. Next week changes to the scheme will come into force meaning employers will have to pay 10 per cent of furloughed employees' salaries - rising to 20 per cent in October.
Throughout lockdown many families got a new addition to their family to help ride out the loneliness inflicted by the social exclusion. We were no different when we introduced Basil to our little family: a black kitten with a tuft of white under his chin, he's absolutely gorgeous. He joined our older cat, my first pet, Chewie who's four. But of course, new pets bring new responsibilities and getting him to the vet for his vaccinations and microchip was number one priority for us. Although we have Chewie, it's been a good while since we took him to the pet doctor, about this time last year for his boosters in fact.