There’s more to the charming historic town of Cheltenham than the races, says Adam Bloodworth. It’s worth visiting all year round
THE WEEKEND: Cheltenham has all the splendid things that very posh towns with grand rivers have, like Regency era buildings, ornate public gardens and neat rows of shops selling clothes made of fabrics that speak to a forgotten notion of Britishness. It is a nice place, the sort of place where your shoulders relax and your mouth makes a big “aaaah” noise before you’ve realised it’s happening. There are wide pavements and gentle flurries of traffic but not enough to make this town feel frenetic. Let’s call it the Bath of the Midlands. (There’s a fierce debate about whether or not Cheltenham counts as ‘Midlands but our vote is ‘yes.’)
Either way, the town is a lovely sojourn from the capital for the weekend. There’s even – as of recently – the town’s very first rooftop bar. Very swish.
THE STAY: I checked into somewhere that epitomises the grandeur of Cheltenham. The Queen’s Hotel opened in 1838 during the inaugural year of Queen Victoria’s monarchy. The pine that forms the original revolving doors has lost some of its smart lacquer, the carpets some of their bounciness, but it doesn’t matter: this property – on the corner of a Georgian square – still feels every bit the spectacle.
It’s easy to imagine the flâneurs of the day gliding through this entrance way and toasting to a new era of vast hedonistic excess over a lobby cocktail. Old photos from the hotel’s past are in the public spaces, but not in an OTT way. This hotel is well aware of its requirement to feel fit for modern use.
Rooms are comfortable with great big windows looking over the Number 131 bar on the fringe of Imperial Gardens, and you can imagine the bright young things of the day out in the park in the summer, flirting as they lay next to their top hats.
THE FOOD: There’s a lovely restaurant on the ground floor called Victoria’s (no guesses why) with exactly the sort of hearty British food that you want from a grand old British bolthole. Beef fillet and fish and chips and goat’s cheese tarts. For starters there’s smoked haddock and mushroom arancini. In the summer a horse box is in the garden where some find minds shake cocktails. I sunk a couple under a grand old tree overlooking Imperial Gardens. It’s the sort of place you could spend the afternoon and accidentally find that it had bled into the evening.
THINGS TO DO: Cavort about like a Victorian in your finest corsets, petticoats and starched white collars. Like Bath, Cheltenham is a history lesson: right by the hotel is the Promenade, which, built in 1818, is lined with Chestnut trees and is a brilliant example of the ambitious town planning mindsets of the Regency Era. There are lots of famous festivals to arrange a trip around: next up from 12 – 15 March is the Cheltenham Festival for horse racing, and in October the Cheltenham Literary Festival welcomes authors and celebrities. The Jazz Festival is the first week of May.
VISIT YOURSELF
Rooms at the Queen’s Hotel in Cheltenham start from around £100 per night. For more information on Cheltenham go to visitcheltenham.com
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