The Impossible Rise of Bournemouth: From Empty Wasteland to Britain's Wealthiest Resort

[00:00:00]There is a garden by the sea on the south coast of England where families spread blankets and children [music] chase one another between the flower beds. And almost none of them know the whole thing was designed for the dying.

[00:00:13][music] The sheltered paths, the windbreaking pines, the slope toward the water. It was laid out deliberately as a place for the sick to take their final walks in comfort. And the man who planned it [music] is said to have written a terrible line about the people it was meant for. They come here to die. Let us make death beautiful. Two centuries [music] before that garden existed, there was nothing on this coast at all. No village, no name, only Gorse [music] and Sand and the smugglers who used the empty beach in the dark. And yet within a single human lifetime, that same worthless heath would become one of the most fashionable and expensive resorts in Britain. A place that turned into a by word for [music] wealth and comfort and gentile good taste.

[00:01:10]This is the story of Bournemouth. It did not rise on sunshine and it did not rise on the sea. It rose on sickness. And the man who founded it had first come to that empty coast for the opposite reason entirely. [music] He came to hunt the only people who used it.

[00:01:30]Before any of it, there was the Heath.

[00:01:32]In the first years of the 19th century, the ground that would become Bournemouth was known as Pool Heath or Bourne Heath.

[00:01:39]a wide expanse of acid sandy soil and gor [music] crisscrossed by cart tracks with a small stream called the Bourne draining quietly into the sea. It was not a village. [music] It was barely anything.

[00:01:53]The land was cut through by steep wooded gullies the locals called Chinese and it stretched for miles along the water without a single house of note. The only people who came here came for reasons of their own. a few fishermen, turf cutters digging fuel out of the ground, and most of all, smugglers. This coast was one of the great smuggling shores of George and England. Undercover of darkness, boats ran cargos of brandy and gin, tea, and tobacco straight onto the deserted beach. And the [music] Chinese gave them steep hidden paths in land where no customs officer could easily follow. One of the most famous smugglers in the whole of Dorset, a man [music] named Isaac Guliver, built a fortune out of exactly this trade, moving contraband through the heaths and hamlets [music] all around. There was a lonely building nearby called Decoy House, long remembered as a haunt of the smuggling gangs. And when eventually a single small inn was raised near what is now the center of the town, it catered to travelers and to the smugglers who moved through the dark. That inn was for a long time the closest thing the future Bournemouth had to a heart. A pub for outlaws on an empty shore, which is where our founder comes in, though not yet as a founder. His name was Lewis Tronwell, a Dorset gentleman, a squire, a magistrate, and a captain in the county's part-time cavalry, the Dorset Yomenry. During the long dread of the Napoleonic Wars, when England lived in genuine fear of a French landing, Tunwell was given a job. Between 1796 and 1802, he led a detachment of rangers along these very clifftops, [music] keeping watch through the night for two kinds of intruder, enemy boats from across the channel, and smugglers slipping up through the Chinese. He knew this ground the way a soldier knows a border. He had ridden it in the cold and the dark, guarding it against the lawless. He could not have imagined patrolling that baron nothing, that he would one day build the first house upon it and be remembered forever as the man who made a town. The thing that changed him was grief. In 1807, Trigonell and his wife Henrietta lost a baby son. The child whom they had named Groner died suddenly and Henrietta sank into a deep and lasting melancholy. As so many people of their class did in that age, they went to the sea to recover, taking rooms at Muddford, a little way along the coast. [music] And it was there in the summer of 1810 that Lewis took his grieving wife for a ride across the old heath he had once patrolled out toward the view of the water. She found it desolate, barren ground, thin gor, the wind off the channel. But there was something in the emptiness and the seaight that caught her, and she was by every account utterly captivated by it. Her husband, who could deny her nothing in her sorrow, decided to buy her a piece of it. He purchased around 8 and a half acres of that worthless heath between an old decoy and the sea for the sum of 179 on it. Over the next two years, he built a house. It was finished in 1812, and they called it the mansion or Bourne cliff. It was the first proper dwelling in what would become Bournemouth, and it still stands today, hidden inside a later building. Around it, Tunwell laid out gardens and did the thing that would in time matter more than anything else.

[00:05:46]He began planting pine trees, Scots pines, thousands of them eventually, sheltering a walk down along the little stream to the beach. He believed, as many did, that the reinous scent of the pines mixed with the sea air was good for the health. He was planting without knowing it the entire future of the [music] place.

[00:06:10]And then for a very long time, absolutely nothing happened. [music] This is the part the postcards leave out. We imagine these stories as gold rushes. A single spark and then an explosion. a wasteland transformed overnight into a boom town. Bournemouth was not that. Tragwell built his house, rented out a handful of small holiday villas to a few wealthy friends, and the settlement simply sat there quiet and tiny for a generation. Other gentile gentlemen trickled in and built the odd villa of their own. But by 1841, nearly 30 years after that first house went up, there were still only around 30 houses scattered across the whole of the Heathland. Trenwell himself died in 1832, long before there was anything you could honestly call a town. The place that would one day hold tens of thousands of people spent its first quarter century as a lonely cluster of houses on an empty shore.

[00:07:12]So what turned a founders's private retreat into one of the great resorts of Victorian Britain? It took three things.

[00:07:19]And strangely enough, not one of them was the founder. The first was a second man with a much bigger idea. His name was Sir George William Taps Jervis. And his family owned enormous stretches of the land around Trigonell's little settlement. Where Tonwell had built a home, Taps Jervis saw a business.

[00:07:37][music] In 1836, he hired an ambitious young architect [music] named Benjamin Ferry and told him to draw up plans for a whole resort, [music] a planned marine village modeled on the fashionable seaside towns that were already making fortunes elsewhere on the coast. [music] Two years later, in 1838, the first real hotel opened its doors. The Bath Hotel, standing proudly above the bay. For the first time, Bournemouth had somewhere for strangers to stay [music] and a deliberate plan to bring them. But Taps Jervius and his architect were selling something very particular. What they offered was not the ordinary seaside holiday of bathing and amusement. What they offered was the AIRIR, which brings us to the second thing, a book and the doctor who wrote it. In the summer and autumn of 1839, [music] a well-known and fashionable London physician named Augustus Bosy Granville set out on a tour of England's spars and seab bathing places, testing their waters, their lodgings, and their climates so that he could recommend the right one [music] to the right patient.

[00:08:47]Two years later, he published his findings in a widely read work called the Spars of England. And when he reached this small half-built settlement on the Dorset coast, sheltered by its young pines and washed by its mild sea air, he was deeply [music] impressed.

[00:09:04]Granville praised Bournemouth in print as an ideal place for people suffering from what the Victorians delicately called chess complaints. He meant one thing above all. He meant consumption.

[00:09:17]To understand what happened next, you have to understand what consumption was to the people of that century.

[00:09:23]Consumption was tuberculosis and it was the great killer of the age. For decades, it was the single leading cause of death in Britain, a disease so common that before the middle of the century, it was blamed for something close to 1 in4 deaths. It hollowed people out slowly over months and years with fevers and weight loss and a cough that eventually turned to blood. And here is the crucial terrible fact at the center of this entire story. There was no cure.

[00:09:53]None. Every treatment a doctor could offer was merely paliotative, a way of making the patient comfortable while their body was left to heal itself, which most of the time [music] it did not. And the single most common prescription for anyone with money enough to follow it was a change of air.

[00:10:11]Go somewhere mild. Go somewhere sheltered. Go somewhere the doctors say the climate is kind. Doctors began to say it about Bournemouth. And so the sick began to come. But the dying arriving is only half of it. What makes this story genuinely strange is what the town chose to build for them. Because Bournemouth did not hide its invalids away or apologize for them. It built a paradise around them and it made them the whole point. In 1855, the town opened the Royal National Sanatorium, an institution dedicated to consumption and diseases of the chest. Around it grew a whole ecosystem of specialized homes, places for invalid ladies, houses for the chronically ill, lodgings run for people who had been sent here by their physicians with the unspoken understanding that they might not be going home.

[00:11:09]Elegant villas in the Italian and Greek style crowded onto the clifftops, white and grand, overlooking the water.

[00:11:18]Advertisers called the [music] place an invalids paradise full of pines and ferns and rodendrrons.

[00:11:26]And in a phrase that tells you everything, [music] the newspapers of the day nicknamed it a metropolis of bath chairs after the wheeled chairs in which the sick were pushed slowly along the seafront to take the air. They laid out gardens for them. The sheltered walk through the pines and flowers down along the valley of the Bourne was known for years quite openly as the invalids walk.

[00:11:51]A place designed so that the weakest [music] patients could stroll among the trees protected from the wind. It is [music] a beautiful public garden still, and it was here tending this strange work of making a lovely place for people to die in, that the man who laid out the gardens by the pier is said to have written that line I began with. They come here to [music] die. Let us make death beautiful. And here is the detail that still [music] stops me every time I come back to it. One of the people this town [music] managed to keep breathing for a few more years used that borrowed time to write a book [music] that almost everyone watching this will know by name.

[00:12:36]In 1884, the Scottish novelist Robert Luis Stevenson, already gravely ill in the lungs, settled in Bournemouth in the hope that the air would keep him alive a little longer. He stayed for 3 years in a house he named Scaryvore, mostly confined indoors, coughing and hemorrhaging, describing himself in one grim, unforgettable image as living there like a weevil [music] in a biscuit. And yet in that sick room, in the town built for the dying, Stevenson did the finest work of his life. It was here that he wrote Kidnapped. It was here, in a single feverish burst, that he wrote the strange case of Dr. Jackal and Mr. Hyde. The town of Invalids gave the world its darkest story about the two halves of a human [music] soul. All of this, remember, was profitable.

[00:13:29]Deeply, quietly profitable. The people who could afford to chase a cure across the country were by definition people with money, and [music] Bournemouth catered to them with a care that shaded into snobbery. The town courted what the Victorians frankly called [music] the better class of visitor. It was expensive. It was gentile and it worked hard to stay that way. When the age of the railway arrived and cheap excursion trains began carrying ordinary working families to rock seaside towns up and down the coast, Bournemouth held itself apart for as long as it could, protected by its distance and its prices. a resort for the affluent and the ailing rather than the day tripping crowd. Now, the title on this video calls Bournemouth, Britain's wealthiest resort. And I want to be honest with you about that because the truth is more interesting than a simple boast. There is no ledger that ever crowned a single richest seaside town. And I am not going to pretend [music] there is. What is true and what the record shows clearly [music] is that Bournemouth became a byword for a particular kind of exclusive, comfortable, moneyed respectability, a place associated with retired wealth and fashionable visitors [music] and the aristocracy of illness. By local tradition, even the Prince of Wales is said to have kept a discrete house here for the actress Lily Langry. Whether or not that particular story is true, the flavor of it is exactly right. This was the coast of the well-off. And then the floodgates opened anyway. The railway finally reached Bournemouth in 1870 and it changed everything. Suddenly the town was within easy reach of London and the great industrial cities of the Midlands.

[00:15:18]And the trickle of wealthy invalids became a flood of visitors of every kind. The numbers are almost hard to believe. In 1851, Bournemouth had been a village of just 695 people. By 1861, that had crept up to 1,77.

[00:15:37]But then came the railway, and by 1881, the population had leapt to around 16,000.

[00:15:44]And only 10 years after that, it had more than doubled again to 37,000.

[00:15:50]By the turn of the century, it stood at nearly 60,000.

[00:15:54]In two generations, a stretch of empty heath had become a substantial town. The town dressed itself for the part. An elegant iron pier replaced the old wooden jetties. In 1880, winter gardens and pleasure gardens and a grand shopping arcade appeared. A wealthy hotelier built his wife a fantastical clifftop mansion that survives today as the Russell Coats Museum. The place that had begun as gorse and smugglers now had an orchestra and libraries and a skyline of white villas and church spires. The impossible had happened. The wasteland was a city.

[00:16:32]But there was one last irony waiting, and it is the deepest one of all. The entire town had been built, sold, and made rich on a promise. The promise was that this air, these pines, this mild and sheltered coast, could heal the sick, and it could not. The pine scent was pleasant, the climate was gentle, and for a person worn down by illness, that comfort was surely worth something.

[00:16:54]But tuberculosis was never cured by sea air or resin or a walk in a sheltered garden. It was not truly beaten until the middle of the 20th century when antibiotics finally arrived long after the Victorian sanatoriums had done all they could, which was to make the dying comfortable. Every consumptive who came to Bournemouth chasing a cure was in the end chasing something that did not exist. The founders's pines were medicine that never worked. The whole shining resort had grown up around a hope that could not be kept. And yet, here is the thing. The town is still here. The myth was false, but the place it built was real, and it outlasted the sickness that made it. Walk through Bournemouth today, and the evidence of the whole strange story is hiding in plain [music] sight. Trigonell's original house, the first building on the empty heath, still stands, folded now into a hotel in the town center. The pines he planted still shade the Chinese running down [music] to the sea. The invalids walk is now simply the lower gardens, where people eat their lunch in the sun with no idea it was ever a place for the dying. Stevenson's Scary was destroyed by a bomb in 1940, and its footprint is kept as a small, quiet memorial garden. The town grew old along with its reputation and to this day it carries a gentle association with retirement and the later years of life.

[00:18:16]A final echo of the coast where people once came to spend their last seasons which brings us at the very end back to a churchyard. At St. Peter's Church in the middle of the town lies Lewis Treonwell, the smuggler hunter who built the first house and never lived to see the city it became. And a little way up the same slope stands another tomb, one of the most visited graves in all of England. It belongs to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. The most famous story ever written about the dream of defeating death, of dragging life back out of the grave. Buried with her by long tradition, is the heart of her husband, the drowned poet Percy Bish Shel, kept by Mary in a silk wrapping for the rest of her life. Mary Shel barely lived in Bournemouth at all. Her son had begun building a grand house on the cliffs nearby, hoping the celebrated sea air might do his ailing mother good, and she came to see it rise, but she died before it was finished. [music] She had come, like all the others, for the promise of the healing coast, and like all the others, the promise did not save her. A town was conjured out of nothing to make death beautiful. And it worked.

[00:19:24]It is still beautiful. More than a century after almost everyone forgot what it was for. If you found this story as strange and as haunting as I did, do subscribe [music] before you go because there are a great many places like this.

[00:19:40]Ordinary towns with impossible [music] histories buried just beneath the surface. And I dig one of them up every week. [music] And if you want another one right now, YouTube reckons you are going to like the video on your screen.

[00:19:55][music] So go on, click it.