From walks and drives and cruises, and chiefly from this Museum, I began to piece together the growth of Ilfracombe. It is an epitome of seaside history, and this must be the kind of way it grew. Until a hundred and fifty years ago nobody cared about living by the sea, unless they were fishermen or sailors. Then, Ilfracombe consisted of a harbour naturally guarded by Lantern Hill, on the top of which is an old chapel of St. Nicholas, possibly Celtic in origin. Nearly a mile further up the brook which poured into the harbour were an old village and parish church. In that large and graceful church today you can feel the old West Country Ilfracombe about you, for it is a singularly countrified church for so large a town. It has carved barrel roofs of wood; it has wall tablets and low West-Country style columns. And not far off are old houses with slate-hung sides, yellow stucco fronts and Georgian windows. In a place called Cuddeford’s Passage, off the High Street, I found Clovelly-like cottages built of slate and whitewashed.This is all genuine Devon.
In Georgian days the harbour was extended. Ilfracombe grew as a fishing port. Then in about 1830 someone saw its possibilities as a watering place. Mild, warm, almost as sunny as Nice, it was a fuchsia-shaded ilex-waving paradise. Indeed, the poet Charles Abraham Elton of Clevedon thus described it in 1835—
Thy craggy coves, O Ilfracombe!
The outline of thy ridgy hills,
The ash-tree dell’s sun quivering gloom,
And pebbled dash of viewless rills.
Many attractive Georgian houses were built above the harbour and set snugly down in the grassy valley between harbour and church. Still later, this mild climate and these mildly beetling rocks, not too rugged and wild, these well-spoken Devon sailors round the little harbour—all were just the thing for Mid-Victorian merchants and their families. So next came stupendous hotels erected in the turfy hollow, St. Pancras Station in white brick, the Louvre in red and white bricks. These hotels are the most impressive buildings in the place and the most prominent is the Ilfracombe Hotel built in 1867 in the French Gothic style in coloured bricks.
Since those Mid-Victorian days, Ilfracombe has changed in character. Rich West Country and London merchants ceased to come. The Welsh arrived by steamer from Barry, Swansea and Cardiff; the railway opened in 1874 and made the journey less adventurous and the place less what used to be called “exclusive”. So the combe filled up not with noble isolated villas proclaiming the riches of their occupants, but with large hotels and rows upon rows of boarding houses designed to cram bedrooms into the smallest possible space.Ilfracombe became what it still is, the people’s playground.
My last picture of Ilfracombe is not of sea, nor of Devon but of that peculiar and exotic thing known as “seaside”. I stand on a steep hill on the way to the station. Warm salty air is round me and I can smell the Atlantic but cannot see it. There rises in front of me a row of late Victorian boarding houses in shiny yellow brick, relieved with shiny red, a style very popular in Ilfracombe. The roofs are of blue slate and red tiles pick out the ridges. The cast-iron railings are painted silver and the garden behind them is bright with lobelias, geraniums and hydrangeas. A palm tree rises as high as the first floor window. The piers of the front gate are topped with pieces of white quartz. Ilfracombe, with your chapels, evangelical churches, chars-à-bancs and variegated terraces, long may you lie embedded in your gorgeous cliffs and hills!Nature made you lovely.Man has not improved you.But on a sunny summer evening you are lovely still. Clevedon
Clevedon has the most character, the widest diversity of scenery, the fewest really hideous buildings of all the “seaside” places I have lately visited. It is quiet, mild, medium-sized. Its churches are full, its shops are polite, the same families come to it year after year, the same type of people who like peace and who mistrust so-called “progress” walk along its ilex-shaded roads. Upon that slender cast-iron pier, built in 1869, strode T. E. Brown, the Clifton schoolmaster and poet. Here he composed a poem about the salmon rushing up the Severn from the sea. To Clevedon, the body of Arthur Hallam was brought in 1833—
The Danube to the Severn gave
The darken’d heart that beat no more;
They laid him by the pleasant shore,
And in the hearing of the wave.
There twice a day the Severn fills,
The salt sea-water passes by,
And hushes half the babbling Wye
And makes a silence in the hills.
Not thirty years earlier Coleridge had brought his young bride to Clevedon to a small cottage which still survives:
Low was our pretty cot:our tallest rose
Peeped at the
