A PERSONAL LOOK AT THE HISTORY OF THE AREAby John Webster, former Chairman of Chelsea Square Management Ltd. The name ‘Chelsea Square’ doesn’t really reflect the rich history of the town or the area that has come to bear its name. Had it been called St. Mary’s Square or Shaftesbury Square it would have been much more fitting. As it is, the name conjures up images of Russian Oligarchs and expensive football clubs, or twee 60s ‘swinging’ London – which is as trivial now as it was then. Those who named it evidently had little understanding of local history.

But in another way the name is fitting. Cheltenham started out as fashion, and has matured into style, rather like Twiggy. Thirty years ago the name of the square would have been a bit provocative. Now it’s just mildly irritating and embarrassing. It certainly doesn’t do the town or the area justice. But it’s a name we have to live with, and work to enrich, in the same way as people born with an unfortunate name have to be so much nicer than the rest of us to avoid being laughed at.

But, fortunately or unfortunately, Cheltenham began in aristocratic frivolity. It became a watering hole for the idle rich and their political careerists as the carnage of the French revolution and Waterloo were being acted out in Europe. Wellington visited the town four times – not day-trips, but extended sojourns. A notorious womaniser (as well as superb general and hard-line prime minister) he simply accepted that large parts of the town were the product of rich lascivious gentlemen who housed their concubines and mistresses in the new fashionable terraces and estates that went up.

Until, that is, Dean Close arrived at St. Mary’s Church and like one of those sheriffs in a popular western, cleaned up the town. Tennyson, who lived just round the corner from Chelsea Square in the 1840s, called him ‘the Pope of Cheltenham’. Actually, he was more akin to Wyatt Earp. Victorian prudery grew out of Georgian indulgence, destitution, violence, exploitation and immorality. It was a classic lash-back and not without justification.

George Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington, visited Cheltenham for a second time in 1816, shortly after the Battle of Waterloo. He was a national hero, later to become Prime Minister. One of the true art treasures of the town is hung in the Mayor’s parlour, the least well known of a famous triptych of pictures celebrating the ‘Iron Duke’. The portrait shows a rather lonely individual without any trace of malevolence or conceit or the lasciviousness you might expect from such a womaniser, but a man whose thoughts are far away. A workaholic who converted his bathtub into a writing desk when he became PM so that he could work while he bathed, he represented the old Tory principles that he had always aspired to from his rather poor aristocratic Anglo-Irish origins.

Aristocratic wealth was predicated on the Corn Laws. The Government set the minimum price in order to secure profits for aristocratic landowners. He wouldn’t repeal them, and as a failed PM, passed the responsibility to Robert

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Peel to do it. Aristocratic Tories passed the batten to that new wave of progressive Tories, who represented ‘the nation of shopkeepers’ that Napoleon so incisively characterised England as being made up of. It wasn’t meant to be an insult. Napoleon envied this commerce.

***Cheltenham has its origins in the far past. Its Anglo-Saxon name means, literally, ‘village under the cliff’. Until it became a Regency watering hole in the late 18th century it was a sleepy one street town with alleys and lanes leading from it and surrounded by ‘good agricultural land…particularly famous for the quality and quantity of its tobacco crops until its cultivation was restricted to the New World’1. Following the discovery of ‘Spa’ water in 1718 the population increased and by 1800 it had doubled to about 3000 – and then really took off as ‘Spas’ became popular.

The very first spa is in the grounds of the Ladies’ College which was at the end of Well Walk as it came out of St Mary’s Church yard and passed along Crescent Place and through what is now the bus station in Royal Crescent. Captain Henry Skillicorne discovered it being pecked at by pigeons on land which came to him when he married Elizabeth Mason – which is why at the top of town centre direction poles you will see a pigeon, and why it perches on the top of the town’s coat of arms. Skillicorne has a plaque in St. Mary’s Church, and his wife – a much more endearing character – was buried in the Quaker graveyard in 1799, in lowly Grove Street, just up the road from the infamous Shakespeare Pub which had existed with the same name from at least 1820 until very recently when it reinvented itself shamelessly as the ‘Shamrock’, aiming for the Irish Gold Cup festival goers.

St. Mary’s Church is at the heart of the town. The present building dates from the 12th century but a church occupied the site four hundred years earlier. For generations it was the centre of the community – it was social services, employment exchange, school and advice centre before these institutions existed as part of the welfare state.

The Reverend Francis Close was vicar of St. Mary’s for 30 years – up to 1856 and in this time the basic infrastructure of the town was developed. Regency Cheltenham was essentially a good time town built on the back of aristocratic tourism and privilege – and Dean Close was highly Conservative and bitterly attacked what he saw as

the lax morals of Cheltenham ‘Whigs’ and aristocrats. He opposed

1 ‘The other side of Regency Cheltenham – A history of the Lower High Street Area’ – Heather Atkinson

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horseracing within the town boundaries as well as alcohol and tobacco, and even trains on Sundays – but he was a great promoter of education at all levels and both the Cheltenham College (founded as the Boys’ College in 1841) and the Ladies’ College (1853), as well as the teacher training colleges of St. Paul’s and St. Mary’s (which later became part of the University) and Dean Close School, were in part his creation. He didn’t do this alone – consider the dedication of Miss Beal who for 50 years ran the Ladies’ College and established a culture that pioneered equality for women!!! But he was always there. Education was rightly seen as at the heart of human progress.

If you squeeze through a small oak door on the northwest exterior of St. Mary’s church you come across a tiny room over the porch which was the forerunner of the Devonshire Street School or the ‘Old Charity School’, built in the 1847 for paupers, and part funded by Dean Close. The original school was established in 1683, and the names of the poorer Cheltenham families are scrawled in the plasterwork and on the remains of the timber pews. Some of the most notorious of the town’s contemporary characters can trace their lineage back to this room!

The Devonshire Street School was for boys, and Dean Close provided another for girls – a large and imposing redbrick building at the end of Knapp Lane adjacent to St. Gregory’s School, opened in 1856. The old town workhouse was originally here, and Knapp Lane was originally called Workhouse Lane. A much larger Union Workhouse was later built on what is now St. Paul’s medical centre in Swindon Road.

The Church was also the site of the town’s original market place, having been granted its charter in the days of King John. The brass marks where cloth or rope lengths were measured can still be seen on the southern pathway. It was the centre of life in the town. Over the years as its functions have been stripped away the town has turned its back on it, and the space has become dark and lonely and sometimes intimidating. One of the challenges we have is to resurrect it so that it’s a place that people go to rather than just hurry past. Efforts have so far failed. To the west of St. Mary’s we have what was and still is downtown Cheltenham. Waves of immigrants have passed through the Lower High Street (or Little Dockham) area. The French came after the revolution when the Catholic order Benedictine L’Abbe Cesar

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arrived in 1807 and established St. Gregory’s school. By 1864 St. Gregory’s Church was built. Irish Catholics joined the congregation and there was obviously some friction in the town between them and Anglicans reflected in the street names. Normal Terrace, just off the Lower High Street was named by people who didn’t want to be associated with what they saw as ‘abnormal’ Popery. The century up to the Catholic Relief Act in 1829 was that of Catholic emancipation. No Catholic could be elected to the House of Commons prior to this unless they renounced their faith even if they had the necessary property owning qualifications.

For some, this oppression must have made anti-establishment religion compelling and there are a great number of non-establishment chapels in this part of town – the original non-conformist Cheltenham Church next to the bowling green in Amhurst Rd., built in 1808-9; the Methodist ‘Ebenezer Chapel’ in King Street (1812); another monster Methodist chapel in St George’s Street (1840) and the Christadelphian Hall in St. James’s Square, formally a Baptist chapel (1820). These were the gathering places for the rebellious and the social reformers.

The Cross in St. Mary’s Churchyard, broken and damaged, is a listed monument known as the Wesleyan Cross from the days that John Wesley parked himself at its base and harangued the crowds. Perhaps this where he got his inspiration for the Pilgrim’s Progress from – his demands were just as

much about change in this world as the next one, which is why he was considered dangerous by some, and worshipped by others. It is still a local gathering point for all kinds of waifs and strays and malcontents. ***

Wesleyen Chapel – St. George’s Street.

Edward Jenner (1749 – 1823) lived in the area at 8 St George’s Place sporadically from 1795.

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He used to inoculate free of charge patients in what was known as the Pest house (now Spirax Sarco) in St. George’s Road, and also in Cheltenham Church (below). An important sponsor of this building was the itinerant preacher the Revd Rowland Hill (1744 – 1833), an influential advocate of smallpox vaccination and friend of Dr. Jenner. (This is not the Rowland Hill who is credited with establishing the British Postal system – although it is said that the father or the Royal Mail was christened in deference to the great preacher!!). The graveyard to Cheltenham Church, now called Jenner Gardens, was opened in 1810 and is currently being restored.

Today the Lower High Street is still the place in Cheltenham that enterprising new arrivals start their businesses in – both the Mosque and the Hindu Temple are in this area, and what few Asian shops exist in the town are located here, recently joined by Polish delicatessens.

The town work house was moved in the 1850s to the site of what is now the St. Paul’s Medical Centre which contains five of the town’s doctors’ practices. Prior to this the workhouse had been re-developed as the Mothers’ Hospital. Another medical practice is just down the road from Chelsea Square in the smart red brick building that used to be the ‘Crescent Bakery’, at the junction of St. James’s Square and St. George’s Place.

It was in the work house that the able bodied (the unemployed and single mothers) were incarcerated and forced to work. Old plans for the model Union Workhouse mark the ‘fallen women’s’ yard. There were usually about 250 in-mates, although Cheltenham was relatively liberal with ‘outdoor’ relief – the 19th century equivalent of benefits. Only the really destitute went into the workhouse. It was designed not to be pleasant.

An aerial photograph of this part of Cheltenham shows the site of Chelsea Square with Shaftesbury Hall (or St Mary’s Hall as it was then) with a tennis court adjoining it, and the grand spire of St Gregory’s standing guard over it – magnificent in the dark winter months when it is lit up at night. The spire of St Matthew’s (built 1879) is still standing in this photograph, but is no more. It was removed for safety reasons in 1952. St Matthew’s was originally built as an alternative to St. Mary’s which was considered inadequate for orthodox Victorian worship. There has been friction between the two buildings and their respective parties ever since. Surely, when St. Matthew’s lost its tower, St. Mary’s must have afforded herself a wry smile. The interloper had got her cum-uppence!

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St. Mary’s College was originally housed in Iddminston House at the end of Ambrose St. facing St. Gregory’s. Until recently it was the home of VFB – a French holiday company who have re-christened it ‘Normandy House’. It had been built in 1813 – two years before Waterloo – as a grand private House (Seagrove House) and then became the town’s first hospital before it became the first St. Mary’s Hall in 1850.

St. Mary’s was the first residential Teacher Training College for women students in the world, with strong religious roots that still survive today at the University of Gloucestershire, its current home. The new St. Mary’s Hall on the corner of St. George’s Place and Clarence Street, the site of Chelsea Square, was built in 1869 (architect J.T.Darby) – and was rechristened Shaftesbury Hall in 1961. It is a Grade II listed building because of its history as much as its architectural merit. The Ladies’ Gym next to Shaftesbury Hall fronting Manchester Street (the beginning of Clarence Street) was originally the Quaker ‘Friends’ meeting house, built in 1835 to serve Cheltenham Church. It became part of St. Mary’s College in 1902.

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Clarence Street was so named in 1827 when the Duchess of Clarence, who later became the wife of William IV, drove in her carriage along the newly created street into Crescent Place where she stayed at Liddel’s Boarding House. This luxurious four storey building has a fine porch which, following

the Royal visit, was topped with the Royal Coat of Arms incorporating an almost comically savage lion after it was re-christened the Clarence Hotel in her honour. It is now John Dower House, the Gloucestershire seat of Natural England, formerly the Countryside Commission.

Opposite St. Gregory’s Church and over the road from Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Cheltenham residence at 16 St James’s Square is the old French legation building – until recently ‘Chemistry’

nightclub. What a sad fate for such a fine old building – and what a testimony to the French connection. It was built in the early 19th century, no doubt by French citizens linked to the Church who were refuges first from the revolution, and then from Napoleon. Tennyson left Cheltenham in 1850, but Captain Lewis Edward Nolan lived just round the corner from him in St. George’s Parade, St. George’s Place. Nolan was killed at the Charge of the Light Brigade in 1854 amid great controversy. It could be that Tennyson knew him – and that he was an inspiration for Tennyson’s most remembered poem.

The railway station of St. James was completed in 1847 and built on the grounds of the 20 acre Jessop’s Nursery that was a great Victorian tourist attraction cum park that contained greenhouses, a zoo, nurseries and walks. This was the departure point for the Cheltenham Flyer which got you into Paddington in under two hours! For some years it was the world’s fastest timetabled train service, admittedly only between Swindon and London. The Honeybourne line which slides past it connected Birmingham with the South West and was opened as late as 1906. It is now a much loved walkway and cycle route.

St James’s station and the Honeybourne Line were shortsightedly closed following the Beeching cuts in the 1960s. The railway site lay waste for 30 years until the Waitrose development was completed at the turn of the millennium. Thousands of tons of contaminated land had to be removed because for a time the site had been used as a rubbish dump. Since it had to be shifted the Council insisted on underground car parking to serve Waitrose. The suspension bridge across the entrance to the store was designed by Mike Smith, the town’s last Borough Engineer, who was determined to make sure

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that the line of any potential light Rail system along the Honeybourne line could be preserved, and had it designed to take the appropriate weight.

St James’s station really put the town on the map, and in the same year the Town Commissioners received its Coat of Arms – Salubritas et Eruditio (Health and Learning). It had some justification. The discovery of the spa, by ‘pecking pigeons’, the fetish for the waters and health in general, with the range of schools and colleges made the town attractive for generations of military men and colonial civil servants.

The aerial photograph shows the original Pate’s Grammar school in front of the brewery. The grammar school was a beautiful old building on the site of what is now the Tesco’s store – right next to the ‘centre stone’ above Hinds the jeweller’s shop on the corner of Bennington Street and the Lower High Street. The ‘new’ town market moved here from St. Mary’s Church yard and was approached through a replica Persian arch, long since gone.

A poor reminder of the market is still held on Thursdays just along the road in Henrietta Street car park. It’s been going for about 800 years, on and off, the stallholders lacking none of that casual indifference that market people seem to be born with, designed to make you feel grateful to them for allowing you to buy their fruit and veg.

The Grammar school is much older than the Boys’ or Ladies’ Colleges and was founded by Richard Pate in 1578. He acquired property in the area to generate rents to fund it, still recognisable with their pelican motif – the Pate family crest - plastered onto their facades. The Pate’s Foundation was (and still is) run by Corpus Christi College in Oxford who are its trustees. The school moved in the 1960s up to Hesters Way, and the original high street building was demolished to howls of protest. The building that replaced the Grammar School is vile, domineering and utilitarian, its only virtue being the shops (especially Wilkinson’s) that occupy it and the shelter its canopy provides on wet days. Pate’s amalgamated with the girls’ Grammar school (which used to occupy the current Pittville Comprehensive School building constructed in 1905 off Albert Road near the racecourse) in the 1970s.

Perhaps Pate’s most famous protégé was Gustav Holst, (1874 – 1934). He was born in Cheltenham of Swedish origin, but it’s only recently that a life-size bronze statue of him has been completed to be paraded in the centre of the Imperial Gardens fountain. He would spend hours discussing music, art and progressive politics with his lifelong friend and fellow Gloucestershire-man, the saintly and hugely underrated Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872 -1958). Both of them were great fans of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Indeed, Holst’s 1900 Cotswold Symphony was dedicated to William Morris. Edward Elgar from bordering Worcestershire was another contemporary.

The music of this trio is now part of the fabric of world culture. They all knew this area. The festival tradition goes way back into the town’s past and well before the first literature festival was inaugurated shortly after the second war.

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The brewery dominated this part of Cheltenham architecturally, with its wonderful Chinese Tower (right), and aromatically, with its sickly sweet bouquet of hops and sugar, for over 200 years. It opened in 1760 and closed in the 1990s after going through a series of amalgamations over the years. The original warehouses and tower were kept as part of the planning permission that created the new Brewery complex, finished in late 2005.

Cheltenham is littered with the architectural styles of the Empire, reflecting its past as a place that the Imperial Governing class retired to. At the bottom of the Lower High Street at the end of the entrance to Winston Churchill Memorial Gardens is the squat, almost ugly, St. Mary’s Mission – a Grade II listed building with a porticoed entrance and high Egyptian style doors. It is now a martial arts centre. If you look north towards Hanover St. you see the Byzantine dome of St. Paul’s, and west the French concept behind St. Peter’s. All over the town there are architectural ideas plundered from the rest of the world.

In the 1970s, substantial parts of Cheltenham were designated as Conservation areas. The central conservation area covers over 1500 acres and is the largest in Europe, and there are six more in the town. It has been one of the most important things in the success of Cheltenham as a town. A high quality built environment with green squares and tree-lined streets has meant it has cracked one of the most important challenges modern towns are faced with – of attracting people back to live in town centres.

Chelsea Square is just over the road from the Library and Museum, and opposite the eccentric and quaint electricity sub station (now defunct and half reincarnated as a restaurant). The building was designed by a past Borough Engineer, Joseph Hall, who stole the designs from the 15th century Palozzi Strozzi in Florence. It was built in 1894-5, a year after the Neptune fountain which he also designed and which is located at the bottom of the Promenade. This was modelled on the Trevi Fountain in Rome and is fed by the River Chelt that flows underneath it, and bubbles out opposite the Bayshill pub at the end of Synagogue Lane as it twists round to meet St. George’s Place. The pub is named after the Bayshill Estate (owned by the Skillicorne Family) which was developed over a period of time by the Bayshill Estate Company to include a range of grand houses including those along the length of St. George’s Road, around Parabola Rd., Montpellier and Bayshill Rd. These are some of the finest late Georgian houses anywhere.

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Engineer Hall subsequently emigrated to India and became the Chief Engineer of Bombay. It’s almost certain that that city has relics of Italian holidays littered around it too, and maybe replicas of the dragon and onion cast iron street lamps that he also designed when Cheltenham adopted gas lighting. A number still exist in St. Mary’s churchyard.

Next to the sub-station is the St. George’s Vaults and over the road from it, the old Horse and Groom, now headquarters of the Cheltenham Centre for Change. These two buildings are very old, and local folklore has it that King George III, during his ‘mad’ period dating from 1810, used to skip unaccompanied down St. George’s Place (or Still Lane as it was aptly named then) and have a dram or two in them. Whatever is the case, the Vaults is still one of the best pubs in Cheltenham – unspoiled by the juvenile taste of gassy lagers and mock-Chinese junk food. It’s just changed hands. We shall have to see if this lasts.

The Library, museum and, on the corner, the ‘Palozzi Strozzi’ electricity sub-station

The library is an imposing building on the corner of Clarence Street and St. George’s Place, and was built in 1889. The architect was W.H. Knight. It has a statue of Shakespeare on its front parapet that risks a crick in the neck when it’s looked at from below. The original Art Gallery and Museum dates from 1899, and the rather

friendly ‘pastiche’ extension was added in the 1990s. It houses one of the finest collections of Arts and Crafts antiquities anywhere. Designs for a further extension are being finalised at the moment.

William Morris – the famous designer and progressive socialist - was based at Kelmscott on the banks of the Thames in Gloucestershire from 1871 until his death in 1896, and knew and influenced Cheltenham architects of this period. In the extension to the Ladies’ College done by John Middleton (completed by his son after Middleton’s death in 1885) signs of the classic stained glass of the Arts and Crafts movement can be seen in the upstairs hall. In Middleton’s finest church, All Saints, the stained glass was definitely done by one of the

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key associates of Morris, Edward Burne-Jones. As we have seen earlier this artistic tradition had a very wide impact.

Middleton was a prolific designer considering that he ‘retired’ to Cheltenham He was responsible for five of the town’s churches. He also had a hand in restoring the stained glass in the rose window in St. Mary’s, extended Holy Trinity, and did works in Christ Church as well as to the Ladies’ and Boys’ Colleges. He was an early fundraiser and treasurer of the body that eventually established the museum and art gallery and had his offices on the corner of Well Walk. His only son, John Henry, died aged 50 in 1896, but in that time became curator of the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, Slade Professor of Fine Art and (in 1893) Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. It is likely that he had become addicted to opium, probably because it was prescribed for him for treating a range of illnesses when he was young.

The synagogue in Synagogue Lane just off St. James’s Square, appears in the aerial photograph. It was also designed by W H Knight and is almost unaltered since the day it was opened. There used to be a thriving Jewish community in Cheltenham, no doubt with businesses in the Lower High Street area, and there had originally been a small synagogue in Manchester Street. There is a small Jewish cemetery just off Elm Street, opposite the majestic St. Peter’s church in Tewkesbury Rd, designed in the French style by another Cheltenham architect, W. Daukes, who was a close friend of Middleton. This church is in the middle of a group of Industrial buildings on the flank of the British Gas site. One day it could be the centrepiece of a new development around this run down area of dereliction.

Opposite the pedestrian entrance to Shaftesbury Hall is what used to be the town’s auction house. The building is now the ‘Thai Emerald’ restaurant and has two little green elephants parked on its roof. Above the entrance is an auctioneer’s arm and gavel, and inside there is a splendid glass canopy of a roof,

installed so that the goods could be more clearly seen. It was open until the mid 1970s and sold what today would be considered to be antiques at ludicrous prices. During the 1960s, when the town was sliding into genteel but Spartan middle age, elderly house-owners would sell off the family furniture. Many a student bed-sit had a huge mahogany dresser as standard that turned out to be worth a fortune when the antiques business took off, promoted by

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local people like Arthur Negus who was a regular at the auction room. In those days there were literally dozens of junk-cum-antique shops in the town. They were as common as Estate Agents are now.

Where did the names for the various blocks of development in Chelsea Square come from? Clarence Walk presumably takes its name as an adjunct of Clarence Street. St George’s Tower probably takes its name from St. George’s Place – but what of Union and Chester House? Well, there seems to have been some passing understanding of what used to exist on the site. Union House stands on the site of what used to be the Students’ Union building. The lineage of Chester House is less clear. There are no theories about the name.

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Cheltonians have an affectation about them that is precisely identified by Forest of Dean Author, Winifred Foley, in her novel ‘Child of the Forest’. She was, in her early years, ‘in service’ in Cheltenham. ‘Cheltenham People’ she observed were ‘a little better than they ought to be’. There is still a mild conservative snobbery in the town that looks down on outsiders in the way that the footmen of the aristocrats looked down on honest trades-people, who nevertheless could buy and sell them. It’s the kind of attitude that frequently forms in people who live in the shadow of something they look up to and aspire to, but are slightly in awe of. It can be irritating but shouldn’t get in the way of affection for the town. It’s part of the heritage.

Chelsea Square is a bit like that. It’s like a child whose parents have given it a silly name. Sandwiched between St. Gregory’s and St. Matthew’s, it could have been called something a little less pretentious and a little more respectful to the past. In 50 years or so it, and its name, may have weathered and matured enough to be accepted. That’s just the blink of an eye.

A place becomes more real when the memories of those who built it and lived in it in the past force themselves into present affairs. A sense of place is one of the most stabilising and civilising senses that the human mind can experience and is probably more decisive in cementing the relationships between people than culture or law. We are territorial people. The buildings and the natural world around us are acquired historic capital that we need to understand, interpret and treasure, and try to improve. History, even bad history, is useful in doing that. © John Webster April 2008

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