I reported back in July that long established West Kirby shop Hazelhurst Linen was to close. Well the good news is that proprietor Ian Hazelhurst has reconsidered and is intending to stay open! You can read Ian’s thoughts on his blog or much better still, call into the shop on Banks Road.

I stumbled upon an usual website the other month and revisited it this week. The site in question is called bookcrossing and it lets you find books that have been left by someone else for you to pick up.

The books might have been left on a park bench, in a gym, in a phone box you name it. The owner who leaves the book creates an entry in bookcrossing.com so that other members can search for released books. It’s possible to track the journey of a book from place to place. Sometimes I suspect that a book will be taken without anyone being aware of Book Crossing …though each book should have reference number on it.

So what’s this got to do with West Kirby? Well, surprisingly enough there are some people in West Kirby who are Book Crossing users and they are leaving books out in the wild for people to find! The latest book was left in what has been described as the Village Road cut-through. If you use Book Crossing please leave a comment and let everyone know if it works.

This is the first report of what will hopefully become a regular monthly feature – West Kirby Property Watch.

There were 14 registered house sales in West Kirby in July including:

• the highest transaction was £360,000 for a property in Kings Walk
• the lowest transaction was £93,000 for a property in Kington Road
• 2 properties sold in Ennisdale Drive for an average of £167,500

There are at least two properties currently on the market priced at over £2 million. There are approximately 150 West Kirby properties for sale at the moment.

Across Wirral as a whole, average property prices rose 0.4% giving an annual change of -12.7%

I’ve introduced a minor change to the site this afternoon, so this is just to make you aware of it.

At the end of every post you’ll now see:

Possible related posts (computer generated):

followed by 3  related posts (I hope!) elsewhere in the site. If you’re a regular reader then you may well recall the suggested posts, but new readers will get the chance to find other news items on the site.

I’ll be introducing other little tweaks here and there in due course.

The rebuilding of the Marine Lake wall is now complete and this Saturday, 1st August sees an official reopening of the lake. The wall is already open though as you can see people walking around the lake. The repairs cost in the region of £750,000, mostly funded by the Environment Agency.

To mark the occasion there will be a series of events starting at 11am with a ribbon cutting and various water sport activities running through until about 4pm.