Town Development

Bournemouth around 1800

Imagine being able to travel back through time and visit Bournemouth around1801. 200 years ago things would be very different. The beach and cliffs would be much the same, of course - but there wouldn't be any groynes or signs or railings and certainly no Pier or Undercliff Drive, let alone beach cafes or ice cream sellers. The Bourne Stream which runs through the Gardens today would have crossed the beach to meet the sea where Pier Approach is now.

The area behind the beach and cliffs would have looked more like the New Forest. The only roads were a few sandy tracks. Some of these survive today as the main roads through Bournemouth. The four major routes ran from 

• Iford to County Gates (now Christchurch Road, Old Christchurch Road and Poole Hill, Bournemouth, and Poole Road, Westbourne)

• Bournemouth Square along the present Wimborne Road to the junction with Castle Lane

• Cemetery Junction to Charminster and Throop (now Charminster Road)

• the Lansdowne to Holdenhurst village (now Holdenhurst Road).

There was probably only one building in central Bournemouth in 1801. In the 18th century, a cottage known as the Decoy Pond House stood near where The Square is today and it may still have been there in 1801

Poole and Christchurch were long-established towns. There were villages at Kinson, Throop, Holdenhurst and Iford and a handful of buildings at Pokesdown. But the area between these communities was just a wilderness of pine trees, gorse, ferns and heather. It was known as 'Bourne Heath' while the area we now call central Bournemouth and the Pier Approach was 'Bourne Mouth' - the mouth of the Bourne Stream. There were not many people about, either. No-one lived at Bourne Mouth and the only regular visitors were a few fishermen, turf cutters and gangs of smugglers who landed their cargoes of spirits, tea and tobacco on the deserted beach.

In 1802 there was a big change in the ownership of the Bourne Heath and Bourne Mouth. Until this time it was common land - it did not belong to anyone. An Act of Parliament, the Christchurch Inclosure Act of 1802 and the Inclosure Commissioners' Award of 1805 transferred the land into private ownership for the first time. The land was divided into lots and sold. More than half the land sold was bought by two men , Mr William Dean of Littledown, who paid £639 for 500 acres including the West Cliff and what is now King's Park. Sir George Ivison Tapps, the Lord of the Manor of Christchurch, paid £1,050 for 205 acres including the East Cliff and part of central Bournemouth. Sir George decided to plant thousands of pine trees on his land - a decision which was to have an important part in the development of Bournemouth in later years.

In 1809 a new building appeared on the heath. Bournemouth's first town centre pub was originally called the Tapps Arms after Sir George Tapps, and later the Tregonwell Arms. It stood where Post Office Road meets Old Christchurch Road. The pub was a favourite haunt of smugglers and later became Bournemouth's first post office. It was demolished in 1885.

Bournemouth & the Tregonwells

The birth of Bournemouth as a holiday town can be dated precisely to 1810. In that year Captain Lewis Tregonwell brought his wife to enjoy the fine sea views. The Tregonwells lived at Cranborne, a small Dorset town about 20 miles away, but Captain Tregonwell knew Bourne Heath well because he had led cliff top patrols by soldiers of the Dorset Yeomanry between 1796 and 1802 during the Napoleonic Wars.

In 1810 the couple were on holiday at Mudeford, near Christchurch, and Captain Tregonwell decided to take his wife Henrietta riding across Bourne Heath. Mrs Tregonwell fell in love with the spot and the couple decided to build a house to live in over the summer months. Captain Tregonwell was able to buy 8.5 acres of what is now Bournemouth town centre for just £179 11s (£179.55). The same area would be worth millions of pounds.

From Henrietta Tregonwell's own diary, we know that they slept in the new house for the first time on April 24, 1812. The house survives to this day as a wing of the Royal Exeter Hotel in Exeter Road. But Portman Lodge, a cottage which Tregonwell built nearby for his butler, was badly damaged in a fire in 1922 and later demolished. Lewis Tregonwell is sometimes called 'the founder of Bournemouth' although there are some who think that his wife ought to share the title with him!

Captain and Mrs Tregonwell were not only the first to recognise Bournemouth's suitability as a place to build a holiday home for their own use. They were also the first to see its commercial potential. A woman called Mrs Arbuthnot, who visited the area with her husband in 1824, noted that Captain Tregonwell had built several cottages to let.

Twenty-five years after the Tregonwells started work on their holiday mansion, Bournemouth was still only a small community with a scattering of houses and cottages. 

Town Plans & Growth

All that began to change following the death of Sir George Ivison Tapps in 1835. The family estate passed to his only son, Sir George William Tapps-Gervis, and he had more ambitious plans for the seaside village. He wanted to build a fashionable seaside resort similar to those that had already grown up along the south coast such as Weymouth and Brighton.

Sir George chose the Christchurch architect Benjamin Ferrey to plan his new town. Ferrey's drawings are the earliest pictures of Bournemouth in existence. We need to look at them with care because some of the schemes were never actually built, although descriptions and pictures of them were sometimes printed as if they had already been completed! By 1840 Bournemouth's first guide book was able to describe 'a number of detached villas' suitable for families of various sizes and each with its own garden. These were the Westover Villas, built on land where Westover Road is today.

Ferrey included hotels in his designs for Bournemouth. The first two hotels opened in 1838. One was the Bath Hotel, which went on to become the Royal Bath, although the original building was much smaller and less grand than today's five-star facility. The other was the Belle Vue Boarding House, which stood where the Pavilion is now and later became the Belle Vue and Pier Hotel.

Bournemouth also acquired its first church in 1838, before this people had to travel to Poole, Holdenhurst or Christchurch for Sunday worship. The first church was converted from a pair of semi-detached cottages which stood in The Square roughly where Debenhams is today. A pointed turret was added to the roof and fitted with a bell. During the week the building was used as a schoolroom. As Bournemouth grew, the need for a purpose-built church became increasingly urgent. Work on St Peter's began in 1845. The first Vicar of Bournemouth, the Reverend Alexander Morden Bennett, arrived in 1845 and went on to become an influential figure in the town's early history.

Guide Book including Bournemouth

By 1841 there were still only a few hundred people living in Bournemouth but that was soon to change. In that year the seaside village had an important visitor, a doctor called A B Granville. He was the author of a book called 'The Spas of England' which described health resorts around the country. As a result of his visit, Dr Granville included a chapter on Bournemouth in the second edition of his book. It was this more than anything that put the town on the map as the perfect place for people with health problems, especially chest complaints which were far more common in the 19^th century than today.

Governing Bournemouth

A key date in Bournemouth's history is 1856, the year in which Parliament approved the Bournemouth Improvement Act. Under the Act, a board of 13 Commissioners was established to organise all the things involved in the running of a small but growing town, such as paving, sewers, drainage, street lighting and street cleaning. Under the guidance of their surveyor, Christopher Crabbe Creeke, the Bournemouth Commissioners quickly launched a programme of work designed to improve the amenities of their town and make it more attractive to visitors. The Commissioners continued to govern the town until 1890 and were the forerunners of the Bournemouth Borough Council of today.

Shops

In 1860 Bournemouth's main shopping area was in Commercial Road but as the population grew the shopping area expanded. In 1863 a local property developer called Henry Joy built a three-storey terrace of shops with accommodation on the other side of The Square. Known as Southbourne Terrace, it survives to this day and now includes the main Bournemouth branch of W H Smith and Son. Joy's next project, begun in 1866, was The Arcade which was originally called the Gervis Arcade.

Outside central Bournemouth

The rapid growth of central Bournemouth in the middle years of the 19th century also generated large numbers of jobs for building workers, gardeners, coachmen and servants. This in turn led to development on other parts of the heath. Pokesdown was already an established independent community. Springbourne developed in the the 1860s as a suburb housing workmen and their families together with Westbourne on the west side of the town. Shortly after Boscombe Spa and Southbourne started as separate seaside settlements inspired by what was happening at Bournemouth. Development at Winton was underway by 1870 and at about the same time Moordown began to add to its farm and handful of cottages.

Boscombe

Boscombe still consisted largely of pinewoods and heathland in the mid 19^th century. In 1849 Sir Percy Shelley, son of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley bought Boscombe Manor. In 1860 there were still only a handful of buildings including one pub, the Ragged Cat, which later became the Palmerston Arms. Then in 1868 the diplomat and politician Sir Henry Drummond Wolff built a seaside home called Boscombe Towers, close to the present Burlington Hotel. He called the spot Boscombe Spa because the spring water which rose at the mouth of the chine was bottled and sold as a health-giving drink. Sir Henry hoped to make Boscombe a rival watering place to Bournemouth and a building boom began. Soon it had its own pier, hotels and guest houses, shopping arcade, churches, theatre, schools, reading room, sports clubs and other facilities. Between 1871 and 1901, Boscombe's population jumped from 300 to nearly 10,000 people.

Bournemouth Spreads

Such was the spread of development that by 1876, Bournemouth, Boscombe and Springbourne had actually reached each other and a decision was taken to make Springbourne and an area of Boscombe part of Bournemouth. Westbourne and the eastern part of Boscombe were added in 1884. In 1890, after a seven-year debate, Bournemouth was granted the higher status and additional powers of a municipal borough. In 1901 the year Queen Victoria died, Bournemouth became a County Borough. The Bournemouth boundary map shows the date when each suburb joined the town or borough.

Descriptions & Memories

In less than 100 years Bourne Mouth had become Bournemouth. The rapid changes are brought to life by descriptions written by visitors.

In 'Sisters by the Sea' a book published in 1897, the author Clement Scott remembered his first visit to Bournemouth as a sickly schoolboy in 1855.

Being very delicate, he was 'unable to stand the piercing cold of the Wiltshire Downs' where he lived and was sent from his school in Marlborough to join his equally delicate mother and favourite sister at Westover Villas.

Population

Population statistics for Bournemouth show just how rapidly the town grew once it had established its reputation as a leading health resort. In 1801 the population of the parish of Holdenhurst which took in most of the area now covered by Bournemouth was 489, most of them living in the villages of Holdenhurst and Throop. There were also farms at Muscliff, Moor Down and Strouden Green. The first census figure for Bournemouth without the outlying villages was published in 1851. The figures show just how fast the town was growing in the second half of the 19th century.

1801: 489 (Holdenhurst parish)

1841: 905 (Holdenhurst parish)

1851: 695 (Bournemouth District)

1861: 1,707 (Bournemouth District)

1871: 5,896 (Bournemouth District)

1881: 16,859 (Bournemouth District)

1891: 37,650 (Borough of Bournemouth)

1901: 59,762 (County Borough of Bournemouth)

The present population is 163,400, although the borough now includes Kinson and West Howe, which were in the Borough of Poole until 1931.

Torbay's Development

Torquay began to develop as a resort for the wealthy, at first mainly in the winter, thanks to ships using the harbour during the Napoleonic war and a fashion with the wealthy for bathing.

The two wealthiest Torquay families were the Carys and the Palks. They began to build a town where royalty and the wealthy could come and stay for the winter season. The first building was around the little harbour and up the valley of the River Fleet. In 1801 the population of Torquay (Tormohun) was just 838 people. In 1810 the Terrace was built, the first of the grander buildings overlooking the harbour and something we can still recognise today.

Torquay was already changing rapidly from countryside into a town. The River Fleet was buried in a pipe under the new Fleet and Union Streets and where there had been meadows there were now shops, workshops and houses. In 1851 Mr Cary provided the land at the junction of Abbey Road and Union Street on which to build a town hall. The building is still there today. In the basement was the clink (prison) where locals would be locked up for breaking the law.

The first market was built by Lawrence Palk in 1820, down by the harbour in Torwood Street. Thirty years later, as the town grew, it was moved to Market Street to be nearer where working people where living in Ellacombe.

Another important service that started in Torwood was the towns first gasworks which was built in 1834. This was first used for providing street lighting and for lighting the rooms of the well off.

Unlike the wealthy people living in their big houses up on the hills of Torquay, there were times when working people and the poor couldn't afford to buy food. In 1847 and again in 1867 there were riots in the streets of the town when bread became too expensive for them to buy.

The railway came to Torquay in 1848 when Torre Station  was built. This brought many changes to the town. To begin with London was now only 6 hours away and hundreds of people could travel at one time. Goods could also be moved more easily and for the first time, because of the telegraph which ran beside the railway line, messages could be sent by morse code nearly instantly between London and Torquay. By 1851 the population of Torquay had grown to 11,474. Many working people were needed to build the new town and to provide for the needs of the wealthy, as servants and trades men and women. Many lived in very cramped conditions, often twenty people to a house. In Pimlico, where Woolworths is today, there were lodging houses with 250 people living under one roof!

Even with the railway, building materials such as Portland stone and Canadian timber for building the new town came to Torquay by sea. Sir Lawrence Palk spent a great deal of money in improving the harbour, including building the Haldon Pier in 1867.

The railway soon encouraged richer people to come to Torquay for shorter periods of time, rather like a holiday today. For these people new hotels such as The Imperial, The Torbay, The Belgrave and the Victoria were built all around 1860. The railway even built its own hotel - The Great Western - now called The Grand Hotel.

Many new buildings were built in Torquay to provide facilities and entertainment. The beautiful Assembly Room and Bath Saloons were built above Beacon Quay. Below this building was Beacon Cove which was the ladies bathing beach. Victorians did not like the idea of men and women bathing together. The men bathed from their own cove further along the shore.

Another important building for entertainment was the Theatre Royal and Opera House, in Abbey Road. This was built in 1880. You will know it today as the Odeon Cinema.

Going to church was also very important to Victorians and many new churches were built during the reign of Victoria. Many are easy to recognise because of their tall spires but the grandest is St John's Church, above the harbour, recognisable by its white illuminated cross.