First and Last Loves

hence Meyrick Avenue. Meyrick Park, Meyrick Road. And if you are not sure of the owner of the road, you may often guess its date from its name—Adelaide, Alma, Gladstone. They are hidden behind trees and flowering shrubs, down lengths of gravel bordered with rhododendron, these Victorian villas. Some are hotels, some are now government offices. They reflect every phase of leisured Victorian and Edwardian life—here a hint of Madeira, there an Elizabethan cottage, then an Italian villa like the Royal Bath Hotel. All these are in stucco and not later than the ’seventies. Then brick came in and we have “Flemish style” buildings, with gables and white wood balconies and leaded panes, of which J. D. Sedding’s Vicarage at St. Clements and big house at the top of Boscombe Chine, called The Knole, are beautiful, satisfying examples. They look stately and practical. Later, a brilliant local architect, Sidney Tugwell, designed villas in the new art style with tiny windows fluttering cheerful chintz, low-pitched roofs of local stone and broad eaves—wholesome and simple buildings like home-made cakes. He had his imitators. And each of these strongly individual Victorian houses, not content with its garden-like road, Knyveton Road, Manor Road, Alum Chine or further inland round Meyrick Park, has, or once had, a beautiful garden of its own. So that the real Bournemouth is all pines and pines and pines and flowering shrubs, lawns, begonias, azaleas, bird-song, dance tunes, the plung of the racket and creak of the basket chair.

Lastly the churches have the colour and clearness of the town. I doubt if any place in Britain has finer modern churches than Bournemouth and, what is more, they are all open and all alive. I visited fourteen of them on one week-day and found them all clean and cared for and in most of them people at prayer. Excluding Parkstone with its beautiful St. Peter’s and the lovely Basilica of St. Osmund I thought the finest Bournemouth church was St. Stephen’s in the centre of the town—designed by J. L. Pearson. It is worth travelling 200 miles and being sick in the coach to have seen the inside of this many-vistaed church, all in clean cream-coloured stone, with arch cutting arch, a lofty hall of stone vaulting providing view after view as you walk round it, each lovelier than the next and worthy of a vast cathedral. Away in the suburbs there is much that is beautiful, J. D. Sedding’s famous church of St. Clement, scholarly and West-country looking in stone; Sir Giles Gilbert Scott’s little Roman Catholic Church of the Annunciation, a brilliantly original design in brick, his first work after Liverpool Cathedral; St. Francis’ church by J. Harold Gibbons on a new building estate, white, Italianate and vast. As the day drew to an end I entered a red-brick church in a hard red-brick shopping street at the back of Boscombe. St. Mary’s, Boscombe, built about 1920. Here, out of the noise of the street, was a white, cool and spacious interior, friendly, beautiful, with golden screens and gold and blue east windows, gaily painted roofs and wide and high West-country arches. Clean and white and cheerful, the perfect seaside church. That last experience seemed to typify Bournemouth. You arrive tired from a long journey, you first see only the car parks, buses and jazzy blocks of flats and hotels. You turn into a side road and all is colour, light and life.

3 CHELTENHAM

BOOK ILLUSTRATION can colour a whole town or county. Who can look at a Cotswold manor, the distinct stones, the hollyhock spire, the clipped box, without running his gaze down the flagstones to the bottom right-hand corner where he will expect to find, written on a scroll among the snapdragon, F. L. GRIGGS? Who does not see in Merrion Square or Henrietta Street the Guinness-brown brick, the green, etched-in ironwork, the silver-grey stone of a Malton aquatint? Nor can I help associating the uneven silhouette of the Old Town at Edinburgh with a steel engraving of the ’thirties, while the diminishing terraces of its New Town remind me of more engravings in Thos. H. Shepherd’s Modern Athens. The tumbled cottage by the sandy road, the flaming sunset behind the dumpy spire, the tree-surrounded ponds of southern Surrey can still recall Birket Foster’s wood engravings. The red Dutch cliffs of Willet-land look well in pen and wash, vignetted for the ’nineties and the earliest halftone illustrations. The cover of the Strand Magazine once made the Strand look beautiful, while its pages heightened the romance of Norwood, Brixton and Harrow Weald with its illustrations to Sherlock Holmes. Cheltenham comes from Ackermann’s Repository of the Arts and continues into those lithographed architectural books of the ’forties and ’fifties.

Here is the relative increase of Cheltenham from when the Spa first became popular.

      Census when taken Number of inhabitants Number of houses       1801  3,076   710       1811  8,325 1,556       1821 13,388 2,411       1831 22,942 5,000       1841 31,379 5,653       1851 35,062 7,365

We may put down the popularity of Cheltenham not merely to the fact that George III tasted the water—George III tasted almost as many Spa waters as has the author himself—nor merely to the visit of the Duke of Wellington, which seems to have been a success. We may put it down to liver trouble contracted in the East, for which the Cheltenham waters were long recommended as a cure. The properties of the water naturally attracted the military, so that a glance at the statistics printed above will also serve as an indication of the increase of Empire during the nineteenth century. Cheltenham now covers eight square, tree-shaded miles.

From many quiet houses in