Cheltenham is the most complete Regency town in Britain and one of the few English towns in which traditional and contemporary architecture complement each other.
Cheltenham lies beneath Cleeve Hill, the highest point in the Cotswolds and above the vale of the River Severn. It is known as 'The Western Gateway to the Cotswolds. The village of Broadway being known as 'The Northern Gateway to the Cotswolds.
This edge-of-the-Cotswolds spa town is hard to beat for refined elegance and Regency terraces, annual festivals, Ladies' College and racecourse. Also fortnightly farmers markets, classy shops and restaurants all surrounded by glorious countryside. Cheltenham was selected by The Sunday Times newspaper (March 2014) as one of the best places to live in Britain.
From humble beginnings as a modest market town, Cheltenham became one of the most fashionable health resorts in the country. In 1716, in a meadow outside the town, pigeons were found to be pecking at what turned out to be salt crystals at a spring which led to the establishment of the town as a Spa. The importance of the pigeons leading to the discovery of the 'Spa Waters' is reflected in three pigeons being included in the Cheltenham Coat of Arms. King George III arrived to treat his infirmities in 1788, and the town then known as "Cheltenham Spa" was born.
Visitors can still sample the Spa Waters at the beautiful Pittville Pump Room. John Forbes was the architect and interestingly sentenced for fraud to transportation for life to Australia. The sentence was subsequently commuted to a few years in prison.
The Promenade is considered to be one of the most beautiful thoroughfares in the country, with its tree lined avenue flanked by smart shops and cafes. The principal street of Cheltenham is the Promenade with its fine regency terraces and Neptune Fountain.
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The Promenade has been named as one of the top five best shopping streets in Britain in a poll for Google Street View. Montpellier is where Cheltenham's elite reside. Here, small boutiques jostle for space with wine bars and restaurants such as Brasserie Blanc, Raymond Blanc's informal spin-off of Le Manoir at Oxford.
The centerpiece is the Montpellier Gardens, blooming with flowers and containing a fountain surmounted by a bespectacled Gustav Holst, who was born in Cheltenham and now stands with his baton raised aloft above the water jets.
Visitors from all round the world flock to Cheltenham for the International Festival of Literature and Music, and the town is the western gateway to the Cotswolds.
Cheltenham, on the edge of the Cotswolds, is an inland spa resort of handsome Regency architecture, broad avenues and fine parks. The medicinal waters can be taken at several sites in the town but mainly at the Pittville Pump Room whose blue dome rises above the lakes of Pittville Park. You can still drink from its original pump, and it is England's only source of natural alkaline water.
Cheltenham is world famous for it's horse racing course at Prestbury Park and the main hurdles event being the Gold Cup National Hunt Festival week in March. The town is home to the famous Cheltenham Ladies College known for its outstanding academic excellence.
St Mary's Church is very much in the heart of Cheltenham, its Steeple can be clearly seen from the area near the retail outlets of Boots and Littlewoods on the main shopping street. Although, as with many sites of Churches, origins go back further than the present church, in fact worship here dates back to the 8th Century, the present building has parts that date back to Norman times.
The stained-glass windows are superb and are of Victorian times. The rose Window is particularly attractive, there are many memorials, one in particular is situated next to the Pulpit, this refers to Captain Skillicorne who developed Cheltenhams first Spa, the visit of King George III is recorded also on this tablet.
Visitors will observe an American Flag on display, it was during World War 2 that many American servicemen worshiped here and many have returned to visit the church. Interestingly one of the worshipers was a General Robert E. Lee, he was a decendant of General Lee of the American civil war fame.
Cheltenham offers a thriving town centre with a wide variety of shops to suite all tastes and pockets. In the Montpellier area of the town you will find luxury boutiques and pavement cafes and in the Suffolks area there are fascinating antique shops and top-class restaurants.
Cheltenham is full of gardens and parks to take you away from the grind of working life. The town itself has been described as a town within a park, and is so well known for its green and floral disposition that visitors flock just to see Cheltenham in bloom.
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Don’t miss out on the often missed Sanford Park neatly tucked at the end of the high street, where you’ll find relaxing water features and hundreds of colourful flower beds.
The town of Cheltenham celebrates the arts and sciences in full force from the beginning of May through to mid-October. Start the Bank Holiday season with a Jazz Festival in the Montpellier Gardens before “questioning everything” at Cheltenham’s very own Science Festival. Here you can get interactive with the BBC Science Zone, talk fashion with Vivienne Westwood (deforestation, not shoes) or chat synthetic life with Guardian and Nature Magazine journalist, Dr Adam Rutherford.
The Cheltenham music festival in July is your chance to chill out in the British summer heat (rain). This year’s festival saw Benedict Cumberbatch joining the festival crew in a WW1 piano and poetry reading, accompanied by wartime piano pieces. And that’s just for starters.
It wouldn;t be a visit to Cheltenham without heading to the races for the day with a few plastic cups, a bottle of wine and a will to splurge some dosh on the best name thundering down the tracks. Of course, if you’re not one for the rabble, take your seat in the stands to get the best views and most accomplished company. There are also plenty of fine dining options at Cheltenham Racecourse. You’re sure to work up an appetite with all that betting, after all.
Just four miles out of Cheltenham town center, you’ll find the highest point in the Costwolds, Cleeve Hill, at 330 meters above sea level. The top offers spectacular views of the green and pleasant lands of the area and a perfect picnic spot after the long hike. This site is one of the UK’s SSSI (Site of Special Scientific Interest) and is the largest enclosed “wold” in the Cotswolds.
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Years ago we had an informative talk with a Cheltenham Tourist Information agent, who told us the following:
Well, we got quite a lot on offer here. We've got primarily the shopping and lots of people coming from miles around to look at the shopping. We've also got a lot of Regency architecture and this is one of the finest examples in England, so it's historically well worth visiting Cheltenham. Also we've got superb buildings like the Pittville Pump Room where they have a park and they have petrol on Sundays every Sunday throughout the year and have carriage rides, horse and Monday carriage rides around the park and also bands playing.
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And it's a fun place to go, not just for the tourists but the residents as well. Ten percent of Cheltenham is parks and gardens. We've also won Britain in Bloom. So as you see outside you can see all the flowers that we've got. And this August we're in Entente Floral, which is the European Britain in bloom, if you like. We’ve also got interesting museums, theaters, cinemas, lots of lovely restaurants, very good shopping.
Cheltenham is the center for the Cotswolds, aren't we? Well, this is called that because it's very easy, accessible to all the villages from public transport. And not only that, we also organize our own tours into the Cotswolds. The Cotswolds means it's the range of hills, and this stretches from Bath in the far south, well in up to Chipping Campden in the north. It's a 98-mile stretch and you can walk it, but it's probably better and easier in a bus or in a car.
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You can go around all the little villages and they're all unique, if you like, and they've got different features. But one of the main features of the buildings in that area is the Cotswold honey-colored stone. And they're really pretty. And also we've got this thatch in between. So you've got the older sort of stonework and then the thatching things as well,
Bourton-on-the-Water is the little Venice of the Cotswolds. If you go, you probably see that the Little River Windrush goes through the center and then you've got lots of little bridges that go over the water. So a lot of visitors go there and it's one of the main honeypots of the area and it's very, very busy. We've got other smaller villages like Broadway, which is the sort of antique center of the Cotswolds, if you like, Winchcombe, which is where the local Sudeley Castle is, which is only seven miles from here. It's got a really old middle church, which is really superb.
We've got little villages like Stanton which are in some ways absolutely idyllic. I mean, that's absolute dreams. Lots of Americans came over just to take these lovely cottages and they are beautiful.
You wouldn't see anything like that outside this area. And we've also got Chipping Campden in the north, which is a superb place to visit and numerous other places within the Cotswold range. So there's such a lot to see.
The advantage of using Cheltenham as a home place rather than Stratford or Oxford, is they are very overpopulated anyway. We sort of control tourism where they just take everybody, or they just descend there anyway because they are so famous. So, it's if you want a bit a quieter place to start with, you know, as a base, then it's good to come to Cheltenham.
The Tourist Information Office provided this information from their visitor information website and from the regional Cheltenham Tourism website.
