Bournemouth: the back story

About Bournemouth: the back story

By the ULTIMATE Brighton Editorial Team

Editor-in-Chief: Jai Michael

Until the early nineteenth century Bournemouth was heathland where cattle grazed. In 1810 Lewis Tregonwell and his wife fell for the place, built a house, and began a town; Sir George Tapps-Gervis laid out a resort from 1836, and the railway arrived in 1870.

Bournemouth is young for an English town. Two hundred years ago there was nothing here but heath, pine and a stream, the Bourne, running down a wooded valley to the sea. The resort that grew up in its place became one of the most popular in the country.

Heathland and a house

In 1810 Lewis Tregonwell, regarded as the founder of Bournemouth, visited the beach with his wife. She loved it and persuaded him to build a house there: he bought eight and a half acres and built a home, with cottages for his butler and gardener, finished in 1812. It survives inside the Royal Exeter Hotel. Landowners planted pines on the heath, but there was still no settlement until 1837.

Check opening times and trains on the official sites before you travel.

A planned resort

In 1836 Sir George Tapps-Gervis decided to create a seaside resort and appointed Ben Ferrey, an architect from Christchurch, to design it: villas for families to hire for the summer. The Royal Bath Hotel opened in 1838 as Bournemouth’s first hotel. By 1840 a small village stood here, the Southampton to Weymouth coach had begun to call, and a guidebook had been published. The first shops appeared on Commercial Road by 1851, when the population was still only 695; by 1861 it had risen to 1,707.

Piers and the railway

The pier began as a little wooden jetty in 1855; a wooden pier followed in 1861 and was replaced in 1880 by an iron one. The railway reached Bournemouth in 1870, and from then on the Victorian town grew at a phenomenal rate. A mayor and aldermen replaced the improvement commissioners in 1890.

Bournemouth today

Bournemouth is now a large resort town of more than 195,000 people, with miles of sandy beach, the gardens of the Bourne valley, a university and a lively night-time centre. Its villages, Westbourne, Boscombe and Southbourne, each have their own character.

Our advice: arrive by train, walk down through the Lower Gardens to the pier, then follow the promenade east to the East Cliff and the Russell-Cotes.

Opening hours, prices and seasonal openings change, so please check with Bournemouth: the back story before you go.