Windermere, England

When visitors think of Windermere they probably imagine a large beautiful lake and picturesque waterfront town filled with restaurants and shops. Yes, Windermere is that famous lake, but the town on its shore is Bowness, while the town of Windermere is a mile inland, and more of a functioning local place rather than resort.

Windermere town is a bit less glamorous than Bowness, which is part of its charm as a typical English country town. It is a pity that most visitors to the lake never experience much of Windermere town, because as you'll see here, it is an excellent place to spend some time.

Visitors who arrive by train expecting a shoreline find instead a compact hillside town of stone and slate, with the lake hidden below and to the west behind a ridge of rooftops and trees. It is a working town first and a resort second, which is a large part of its appeal.

Its lakeside neighbor Bowness holds the piers, the boat cruises and most of the crowds. Windermere holds the railway station, the bus connections and a large share of the region's accommodations. The two towns run into one another along a single connecting road, and many visitors treat them as one destination, but each has its own center and its own character.

The town stands high enough above the lake that mist collects in the streets on damp mornings and the far end of a road disappears into gray. Fog of this kind usually burns off before midday, but while it lasts it reduces the town to silhouettes of chimneys, slate roofs and wet pavement. It is a good time to be out, since almost nobody else is.

Coming up from Bowness before breakfast is easiest by taxi, since the route climbs the whole way. The return trip is the pleasant one. Once you have finished looking around Windermere you can walk back down, which takes fifteen or twenty minutes, costs nothing and gives you a good look at the road between the two centers.

The Town Center

The center is small, a handful of connected streets rather than a grid, but it carries enough variety to fill a couple of hours. Shops stand shoulder to shoulder in two- and three-story buildings, most with living quarters above, and the sidewalks are wide enough that stopping to look in a window does not block anyone behind you.

Nearly every building is made of the local stone and roofed in slate, the same materials quarried throughout the neighboring fells. The rock is gray-green and rough-faced, laid in irregular courses, and the slate is thick and unevenly sized. The result is a town that looks as though it grew out of the ground it stands on, which in a literal sense it did.

Window shopping is the main activity here. Clothing shops, outdoor gear specialists and boutiques occupy most of the prime frontage, and several of them keep displays worth a look even when the doors are locked. Hanging baskets and planters go up in spring and are maintained through the season, so the streets carry color even on a wet day.

Bookstores, antique dealers and secondhand shops turn up along the same streets. These are the places that reward slow browsing, and they tend to be run by their owners rather than by chains. Stock leans toward local history, walking guides, maps of the fells and the kind of small furniture that can be carried home.

Art galleries are well represented for a town this size, most of them showing landscape work — the lakes, the fells, the light on the water. Photography and printmaking are common, and prices run from inexpensive prints up to originals. The Lake District has drawn painters for two centuries, and the shops here reflect the continuing local trade.

Mixed in among the gift shops are the businesses that serve the people who live here. A hardware store, a butcher, a bakery and a small supermarket all sit within the same few blocks. This is the difference between Windermere and the more heavily touristed centers around the lake, and it is worth noticing while you walk.

A building society branch, a pharmacy, a barber and a couple of estate agents complete the picture. None of it is picturesque, and that is exactly the point. A town that can still support ordinary services has a resident population using them, and the streets feel different in consequence, particularly outside the summer months.

The souvenir and gift trade is here too, of course, running from handicrafts and pottery through to the usual knickknacks. Several shops set a table or a rack outside the door in fine weather. Between them and the practical shops next door, the center manages to serve two very different sets of customers on the same block.

Eating out is straightforward. Cafes with sidewalk seating open early for breakfast and stay busy through the afternoon, and several of them put out heaters and blankets so the outdoor tables stay usable in cool weather. Coffee, cake and a view of the street is a reasonable way to wait out a shower.

Restaurants cover more ground than the size of the town suggests, with Italian, French and modern British menus within a short walk of each other. Most are small, family-run and busy enough in high season that a reservation is sensible. Prices sit below what the same meal would cost in Bowness or Ambleside.

Indian and Asian restaurants have long been part of the mix in English towns of this size, and Windermere is no exception. A few occupy the more distinctive buildings in the center, including a black-and-white timbered facade that stands out among all the gray stone around it.

Bars and grills fill the evening trade, and a few have taken over older buildings and painted the frontage in strong colors, which reads as either welcome or jarring depending on your view of what a Lake District town should look like. Either way they extend the hours of the center past dinner.

Traditional pubs are the older layer beneath all of this. They keep local ales, serve food at set hours and fill up with a mix of residents and walkers who have come down off the fells. In the early morning, before any of them open, the same streets are quiet enough to hear your own footsteps.

The post office anchors one end of the center, with a red telephone box and a planted bed of tulips beside it. Small civic touches like this are maintained carefully throughout the town, and they do a lot of the work of making a place built almost entirely in the last 180 years feel settled and long established.

Off the main line of shops, several side streets run uphill and away. Oak Street is one of them, marked at its corner by a stone archway. Streets like this are where the town changes over from retail to residential within a single block, and they are worth turning into simply to see how quickly it happens.

Terraced houses line these lanes, built in the same stone as the shops but plainer, with small front gardens and low walls. Covered passages cut between the buildings to connect one street with the next, and they make short work of what would otherwise be a long walk around the block.

A few of the older houses have deep bay windows facing the street, with gardens tucked behind iron railings. Slate is used for windowsills, doorsteps and garden edging as well as for roofs, since it was the cheapest material available when these houses were built and there was no reason to import anything else.

Climbing plants, window boxes and potted flowers appear on almost every doorstep. The climate helps — this is one of the wettest inhabited parts of England, and things grow readily. So does moss, which spreads across walls, roofs and paving in a way that makes recent buildings look older than they are.

There are no pedestrian-only streets in Windermere, but it is a very walkable town all the same. Traffic is light outside the peak hours, the sidewalks are generous by English standards, and nothing in the center is more than a few minutes from anything else. Mornings are the quietest and by some distance the most pleasant time to walk it.

Where to Stay

There are said to be around 300 bed and breakfasts and holiday cottages in and around Windermere, which is a remarkable number for a town of this size and the main practical reason to use it as a base. Even in a busy week, the sheer supply keeps prices more reasonable here than at the lakeshore.

Staying in a bed and breakfast feels closer to being in someone's house than to being in a hotel, because that is essentially what it is. Breakfast is cooked to order and served at a set hour, the owners generally know the area well, and the standard of the rooms in this town is high.

Most of them occupy Victorian and Edwardian houses on the residential streets just off the center, three or four minutes' walk from the shops and the station. Many have converted their front gardens into parking, which matters if you are driving, since street parking in the center is limited and metered.

College Street and Oak Street are both good hunting grounds, each within a couple of blocks of the center. On a visit here in 1992 I stayed at the Holly Lodge on College Street, which was still in business at the time of our most recent visit — a long run, and not an unusual one in a town where these businesses often pass through the same family.

Larger guesthouses and small hotels sit further out, generally on the roads leading toward the lake. These carry more rooms, often a licensed bar and sometimes a restaurant open to non-residents, and they trade the family atmosphere of a bed and breakfast for a little more privacy.

Self-catering is the other option, handled through agencies with offices in the center whose windows are papered with property photographs. Cottages are usually let by the week and are worth considering for a longer stay, particularly with a family, since eating every meal out adds up quickly here.

On the outskirts the houses grow larger and the walls and hedges taller, and a number of these have been converted into guesthouses as well. The trade-off is the walk. Ten or fifteen minutes out of the center is quiet and green, but it is a real distance to cover twice a day in the rain.

Trains, Buses and Tours

Mountain Goat has been our main tour provider in the Lake District across several visits, and their headquarters are here in Windermere, next to the information office. They run small minibuses rather than full-size coaches, which lets them use the narrow passes and single-track roads that the larger operators cannot attempt, and it keeps the groups small enough that you can hear the driver.

Their day tours reach most of the district — Ullswater, Coniston, Wast Water, the Langdales, Hardknott and Wrynose passes — with commentary along the way. For a visitor without a car this is the most efficient way to see the parts of the national park that public transportation does not reach, and half-day options are available as well.

The station itself is at the top of the town, which is the second good reason to stay here. Arriving by train, you can walk to your accommodation in a few minutes with your bags rather than paying for a taxi. Services connect through Oxenholme on the West Coast Main Line, putting Manchester, London and Scotland within reach.

Arriving by car is simple enough, with parking available at the station and in lots around the center, and a car gives you the freedom to tour the whole district on your own schedule. The roads are narrow, walled on both sides in many places, and slower than the distances suggest, so plan accordingly.

Lake Road and the Walk Down to Bowness

Lake Road connects the two village centers, and it is lined most of the way with small hotels and bed and breakfasts. Several are handsome Victorian houses set back behind low walls, quiet and comparatively affordable, and for many visitors they are the best compromise between being in Windermere and being at the water.

Leaving the center, the road drops steadily. The shops give way to houses, the houses spread further apart, and within a few hundred yards you are walking between garden walls with the occasional cottage standing at the roadside. The whole descent takes fifteen to twenty minutes at an easy pace.

Trees close over the road in places, and the sidewalk continues the whole way, so this is a genuine walk rather than a scramble along a shoulder. It also means you can look at Windermere properly even if you are staying down in Bowness, as most visitors do, and simply walk up and back.

Behind one of the hotels along this stretch, the Glen Cree, a brook runs down through the trees on its way to the lake. It is the kind of thing you would never find unless someone pointed it out, and it is a reminder that all the water on these slopes is heading in the same direction as you are.

The stream itself is shallow and fast, running clear over slate and rounded stones, with ferns growing out of the banks on both sides. After heavy rain it is loud enough to hear from the road. In a dry spell it drops to a trickle between the rocks, which does not happen often in this part of England.

Another advantage of staying along this road is the footpath that leads off it and down through the woods toward the shore. The trees here are tall and closely grown, mostly oak and beech with conifers mixed in, and the light on the path stays green and dim even in the middle of the day.

The path takes about twenty minutes and comes out at one of the prettiest small parks on the lake, with grass running down to the water and views across to the far shore. Ivy covers many of the trunks along the way, and the ground is deep in leaf litter for most of the year.

Beyond the Town

The best-known short walk from Windermere starts near the station and climbs to Orrest Head, a rocky knoll of about 780 feet with a view over the full length of the lake and out to the higher fells beyond. It takes twenty to thirty minutes each way on a good path, and it is the walk that first brought Alfred Wainwright to the Lake District in 1930 and set him on the guidebooks that made him famous.

Further afield, the Lakeland Motor Museum sits at Backbarrow toward the southern end of the lake, and the Lakeside and Haverthwaite steam railway runs from the same area. Ambleside, Grasmere and Keswick are all reachable by bus or car for a day out, and the boats from Bowness connect the lakeshore villages without any driving at all.

How the Town Began

Windermere is much younger than Bowness, Ambleside or Keswick. There was no town here at all until the railway arrived in 1847, only the scattered farms of a hamlet called Birthwaite. The station took its name from the lake rather than from the settlement, and the town that grew up around it took the name from the station.

With the trains came visitors, and the town formed quickly. Hotels went up beside the station, villas were built on the slopes above by wealthy families from the industrial cities to the south, and within a generation Windermere had become a tourist center. It never grew as large as Bowness, which is why it kept a small-town feel and a local population of its own.

The parish church went up soon after the railway, as it did in every new Victorian town, along with the schools, the institute and the other buildings a permanent population needs. All of it was built in the same local stone and slate, which is why a town founded in the 1840s reads today as considerably older than it is.

The line was originally planned to continue down to Bowness and the lakeshore, and was stopped in the mid-19th century by opponents who did not want the waterfront disrupted by a railroad — an early and successful piece of conservation campaigning, with William Wordsworth among the loudest voices against it. The lake was left alone, and Windermere kept the station.

Tourism has supplied the great majority of the local economy ever since. There is still some farming in the surrounding countryside, and there was once light manufacturing and mining in the district, but that has largely gone. What remains is a town that has changed remarkably little in the center over the last twenty-five years, preserving its historic character while steadily improving the range and quality of what it sells.

Next: Bowness and the Lake

Windermere town is only half the story. Be sure to read the page about Bowness and the lake, the waterfront town a mile downhill, where the piers, the boat cruises and the shoreline itself are found. The video below covers Bowness and Lake Windermere.

You can also see this video on a separate video page.

The Wider Lake District

Windermere and Bowness are the busiest corner of a national park that covers nearly 900 square miles, with sixteen major lakes, the highest ground in England and dozens of villages worth a day each. For an overview of the whole region and where to go from here, see the Lake District page. The video below covers the district as a whole.