Be sure to pack your pen If you forget a book, says Jeremy Seal, you can always write your own in Ventnor Sunday Telegraph, 2/11/2008
We’ve called at Ventnor’s heritage centre where an elderly woman tells us she’s ‘still got blackberries in the garden. The strawberries are flowering and there are lizards basking on the walls.’ Anywhere else in Britain, these mid-November nature notes could only have meant yet more evidence of global warming. But mild temperatures are nothing new to the Isle of Wight’s southernmost resort which is now bouncing back after decades of the deepest neglect. The same microclimate which first attracted Victorian writers and aristocrats, convalescents and consumptives – Ventnor was until 1969 home to the National Hospital for Tuberculosis – now looks set to revitalise the place as a year-round destination. And with its rich history, architecture and scenery, there’s plenty going on to fill a weekend.
Ventnor and adjacent Bonchurch village occupy the seaward terraces of the thickly wooded ‘Undercliff’ beneath the windbreak heights of St Boniface Down; romantically dramatic, precariously prone to landslip and sheltered to a fault. It’s the weather they bang on about more than anything in Ventnor, a town that only five years ago was not so much tired as terminal. Now the booming jazz festival, currently tuning up for its fifth year, touts the place as the UK’s ‘Deep South’; mint juleps and ceiling fans, you might even imagine, not twenty miles from Southampton. Ventnor hotelier Joe Dos Santos has his own southerly line going, likening the town to his native Cape Town. ‘It’s something about the light,’ he says, ‘and the way the Victorian terraces are stacked up the hillsides overlooking the sea.’
If all this appears overly imaginative, then there’s abundant evidence of recovery, from the festivals – a folk and blues one is also planned – and the newly built harbour to the slew of recent hotel, restaurant and upmarket B&B launches. We’re staying at the seven-bedroom Hambrough Hotel and restaurant which Joe Dos Santos opened in an elegant townhouse above the new harbour last year. The hotel’s bar and restaurant are sunlit simplicity while the stylish contemporary rooms have DVD players and funky espresso machines, sybarites’ bathrooms and expansive sea views towards Normandy; ours also has a spacious balcony. Dos Santos has created a welcoming base in a town blessed with exceptionally diverse architecture; Victorian villas, weathered clapboard beach huts, thatched fishermen’s cottages, caravan-style holiday homes and even the odd Art Deco survivor from the town’s 1930s heyday such as the Winter Gardens venue hall. ‘Oh, the Winter Gardens.’ The lady volunteer at the heritage centre has a gleam in her eye. ‘The best dance floor in the south of England.’ On this Saturday morning, however, a moribund flea market is taking place in the hall where the forthcoming attractions include a steady diet of clairvoyants’ evenings and Led Zeppelin tribute bands. Ventnor may be changing but not in its shabby–grand essentials. The town, which ‘just brims with foibles’ according to the jazz festival’s musical director Philip Snellen, remains a far cry from Bodenised Bembridge to the northeast.
The character of the place is evident along the front where the sand and shingle beach is backed by a series of the quirkiest cultural collisions. An Italianate villa in tangerine and fronted by palm trees stands beside the amusement arcade. There’s another such villa, so spectacularly derelict that it might be a snap-shot of Beirut, and a weatherboard cottage where a locally fashioned blue plaque casually records that Turgenev conceived Fathers and Sons here in 1860. It’s a reminder of the remarkable artistic crowd - Thackeray and Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens and Macaulay, and latterly Winston Churchill and Elgar – who were drawn here.
We stop at Blake’s stilt-raised beach hut to inspect the buckets of freshly landed sole, mullet and bass. The Blake family have been the local longshoremen since the 1830s, hiring out deck chairs and bathing machines, running boat trips and crabbing according to the era and season. ‘Now, fishing’s our main business,’ says Jess Blake. The family will be leaving the hut for expanded premises on the new harbour pier in spring 2007. This development is now in place. ‘Back in the early 80s,’ says Blake, ‘things were so depressed you were ashamed to say you came from Ventnor. Now, the town looks set to become the island’s fresh fish mecca.’
We pass the famous Spyglass Inn, a cosy labyrinth of drinking nooks, and head out along the coastal path, cutting inland through oak woods wherever landslips have claimed the path. No road leads to Steephill Cove, a shoreline squeeze of thatched cottages and beachhuts hung with shell necklaces, worked pieces of driftwood and pirate flags. We clamber among lobster pots to buy famous pasties – filled with crabmeat, leeks and a little lemon juice – at the door of a private house known as Wheeler’s. Then we climb up the path to emerge among verdant stands of palm and magnolias among clumps of bamboo. When the TB Hospital was demolished, the site was given over to Ventnor’s acclaimed Botanic Garden where gardener Simon Goodenough is fostering remarkable collections of plants from New Zealand and the Americas, Australia and South Africa. Even today, the Mediterranean garden smells of sage and oregano.
Bonchurch lies on the other side of Ventnor, a sylvan dream of ponds and villas threaded by pathways, steps cut into the cliff and tinkling rills. The poet Swinburne lies in the churchyard and Winterbourne, recently refurbished as a fine B&B, was the house where Dickens wrote the first six chapters of David Copperfield in 1849; two truly great nineteenth-century novels, then, begun within a stretched stone’s throw of each other. Dickens called Bonchurch ‘the prettiest place I ever saw in my life, at home or abroad’.
We dine at the Hambrough; Jess Blake’s bass, landed just one hundred metres away, is excellent. Then we take to our balcony. We don’t mean to linger – even Ventnor turns raw at midnight in November – but beyond the Cascade Gardens, a Victorian stream rockery topped by a walkway carried on a series of arches, the black sea carries the lights of distant ships heading down the Channel. And I feel a novel coming on.
FACTBOX
Jeremy Seal stayed at the Hambrough Hotel (01983 856333; www.thehambrough.com) where doubles start at £109 per night.
Red Funnel Ferries (www.redfunnel.co.uk; 0870 4448890) sail from Southampton to East Cowes, from xxxx for a car and passengers.
Isle of Wight Tourism: 01983 813813 or visit www.islandbreaks.co.uk
Ventnor and adjacent Bonchurch village occupy the seaward terraces of the thickly wooded ‘Undercliff’ beneath the windbreak heights of St Boniface Down; romantically dramatic, precariously prone to landslip and sheltered to a fault. It’s the weather they bang on about more than anything in Ventnor, a town that only five years ago was not so much tired as terminal. Now the booming jazz festival, currently tuning up for its fifth year, touts the place as the UK’s ‘Deep South’; mint juleps and ceiling fans, you might even imagine, not twenty miles from Southampton. Ventnor hotelier Joe Dos Santos has his own southerly line going, likening the town to his native Cape Town. ‘It’s something about the light,’ he says, ‘and the way the Victorian terraces are stacked up the hillsides overlooking the sea.’
If all this appears overly imaginative, then there’s abundant evidence of recovery, from the festivals – a folk and blues one is also planned – and the newly built harbour to the slew of recent hotel, restaurant and upmarket B&B launches. We’re staying at the seven-bedroom Hambrough Hotel and restaurant which Joe Dos Santos opened in an elegant townhouse above the new harbour last year. The hotel’s bar and restaurant are sunlit simplicity while the stylish contemporary rooms have DVD players and funky espresso machines, sybarites’ bathrooms and expansive sea views towards Normandy; ours also has a spacious balcony. Dos Santos has created a welcoming base in a town blessed with exceptionally diverse architecture; Victorian villas, weathered clapboard beach huts, thatched fishermen’s cottages, caravan-style holiday homes and even the odd Art Deco survivor from the town’s 1930s heyday such as the Winter Gardens venue hall. ‘Oh, the Winter Gardens.’ The lady volunteer at the heritage centre has a gleam in her eye. ‘The best dance floor in the south of England.’ On this Saturday morning, however, a moribund flea market is taking place in the hall where the forthcoming attractions include a steady diet of clairvoyants’ evenings and Led Zeppelin tribute bands. Ventnor may be changing but not in its shabby–grand essentials. The town, which ‘just brims with foibles’ according to the jazz festival’s musical director Philip Snellen, remains a far cry from Bodenised Bembridge to the northeast.
The character of the place is evident along the front where the sand and shingle beach is backed by a series of the quirkiest cultural collisions. An Italianate villa in tangerine and fronted by palm trees stands beside the amusement arcade. There’s another such villa, so spectacularly derelict that it might be a snap-shot of Beirut, and a weatherboard cottage where a locally fashioned blue plaque casually records that Turgenev conceived Fathers and Sons here in 1860. It’s a reminder of the remarkable artistic crowd - Thackeray and Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens and Macaulay, and latterly Winston Churchill and Elgar – who were drawn here.
We stop at Blake’s stilt-raised beach hut to inspect the buckets of freshly landed sole, mullet and bass. The Blake family have been the local longshoremen since the 1830s, hiring out deck chairs and bathing machines, running boat trips and crabbing according to the era and season. ‘Now, fishing’s our main business,’ says Jess Blake. The family will be leaving the hut for expanded premises on the new harbour pier in spring 2007. This development is now in place. ‘Back in the early 80s,’ says Blake, ‘things were so depressed you were ashamed to say you came from Ventnor. Now, the town looks set to become the island’s fresh fish mecca.’
We pass the famous Spyglass Inn, a cosy labyrinth of drinking nooks, and head out along the coastal path, cutting inland through oak woods wherever landslips have claimed the path. No road leads to Steephill Cove, a shoreline squeeze of thatched cottages and beachhuts hung with shell necklaces, worked pieces of driftwood and pirate flags. We clamber among lobster pots to buy famous pasties – filled with crabmeat, leeks and a little lemon juice – at the door of a private house known as Wheeler’s. Then we climb up the path to emerge among verdant stands of palm and magnolias among clumps of bamboo. When the TB Hospital was demolished, the site was given over to Ventnor’s acclaimed Botanic Garden where gardener Simon Goodenough is fostering remarkable collections of plants from New Zealand and the Americas, Australia and South Africa. Even today, the Mediterranean garden smells of sage and oregano.
Bonchurch lies on the other side of Ventnor, a sylvan dream of ponds and villas threaded by pathways, steps cut into the cliff and tinkling rills. The poet Swinburne lies in the churchyard and Winterbourne, recently refurbished as a fine B&B, was the house where Dickens wrote the first six chapters of David Copperfield in 1849; two truly great nineteenth-century novels, then, begun within a stretched stone’s throw of each other. Dickens called Bonchurch ‘the prettiest place I ever saw in my life, at home or abroad’.
We dine at the Hambrough; Jess Blake’s bass, landed just one hundred metres away, is excellent. Then we take to our balcony. We don’t mean to linger – even Ventnor turns raw at midnight in November – but beyond the Cascade Gardens, a Victorian stream rockery topped by a walkway carried on a series of arches, the black sea carries the lights of distant ships heading down the Channel. And I feel a novel coming on.
FACTBOX
Jeremy Seal stayed at the Hambrough Hotel (01983 856333; www.thehambrough.com) where doubles start at £109 per night.
Red Funnel Ferries (www.redfunnel.co.uk; 0870 4448890) sail from Southampton to East Cowes, from xxxx for a car and passengers.
Isle of Wight Tourism: 01983 813813 or visit www.islandbreaks.co.uk
