At the bottom of the hill on which I live lies the Solstice Business Park. It’s pretty well a work-in-progress at the moment; when I first moved here, it was one vast field. And, there are people here who remember when it was a farm.

At the top of the hill is the airfield at Boscombe Down, which is home to Qinetiq. It used to be called DTEO, or the Defence Test and Experimental Organisation, which I liked much better, because it explained more or less what they did.

The connection between the two … apart from our hill … is that Qinetiq runs an apprenticeship scheme for would-be engineers, and those apprentices have just produced the second of the sculptures which decorate the park.

You may remember that I posted about this last year, at http://travelrat.wordpress.com/2007/06/10/13/, when the apprentices, working under the direction of artist Charlotte Moreton, produced a dragonfly out of the fuselage of a redundant Gazelle helicopter. This has, so far, won three regional art and business awards, and will be judged in the national finals later in the year.

Recently, they produced one called ‘The Mallow’, a flower which grows prolifically on the site … or rather, used to grow prolifically, but can still be found in areas which haven’t been built on yet.

They tell me that this is a three-year project, so I wonder what they’re planning for next year?