Bournemouth

- New Living Traditions -

BOURNEMOUTH

City GENT Issue 120, November 2004 Two centuries ago Bournemouth was a sandy heath cut by steep sided ‘chines’, with the Bourne running at the bottom of the biggest. It grew as a fashionable town for people suffering TB and other bronchial problems; with pines being planted to scent the air as an aid to breathing.

The railway came very late to the town, possible because the people who owned Bournemouth didn’t want the unwashed, masses coming here, spending their pennies and driving away the Guinea spending nobs. The nobs soon started holidaying abroad anyway, but Bournemouth managed to survive as a posh place. Like Southport the ‘sea front’ holiday part feels like it’s a different town to the part where the senior social workers and other glories to their class live.

Boscombe

Bournemouth F.C's Dean Court is in Boscombe, a few miles east of the mouth of the Bourne. You can get there by walking along the sea front, passing Britain’s second public nudist beach. The first was at Brighton, on a beach of pebbles and pain. Bournemouth’s is sandy, so if you want to run naked into the sea in the first week of December, you wont have to worry about walking on pebbles, just about them dropping off because of the cold.

Bournemouth seems to have lost three museums: the Rothesay Museum, the Big Four Railway Museum and the Typewriter Museum all seem to have gone to the great museum in the sky; or land fill in the ground. This leaves the Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum. We are sorry that there is no longer a typewriter museum in Britain. Invented in 1868, extinct less than a 130 years later, and now almost forgotten. We wonder where the typewriters ended up?