In our second author profile, Anthea Jones tells how she approached writing her well-received history of Cheltenham.
A new history of Cheltenham? When I started thinking about the possibility, I wondered if there was scope. I had written a history of Tewkesbury twenty years ago, but there history is visible all around. Cheltenham does not wear its history so obviously on its sleeve. What it does have is the large and attractive Regency and early Victorian houses and gardens in its centre, and these have been well-researched. But once I looked more widely, all sorts of interesting ideas start to leap out.
Cheltenham’s medieval history was of much more significance to its later development than might be guessed at first glance. A previous book, A thousand years of the English parish, had shown me the importance of the church as a landowner, especially after inclosure, and I was impressed by the effect which the church’s ownership in Cheltenham had on the development of the town. This was an interesting subject of research.
The villages within the modern Borough bave been closely assoicated with, even integrated with Cheltenham itself since William the Conqueror met his parliament at Gloucester and ordered the Domesday survey of his new kingdom. This was the geographical area which I decided to research. At the same time I discovered that Cheltenham had been a small but significant market town in the county, and then overtook all others in the nineteenth century. So I decided to build in comparisons to place Cheltenham in its local context.
For all the glamour of fashionable society drinking the spa water, Cheltenham had, and still has a much more varied society. The traditional neither could nor should be ignored, but the big cache of Borough council records gradually revealed a quite different Cheltenham, starting in the 1930s and extending to the present time, with its encouragement of industries and offices, not least the mysterious and fascinating GCHQ, and its large investment in social housing.
I walked and drove up and down, round and round. Towns are more complicated to describe than rural villages, but in Cheltenham I found both agricultural and rural history to explore as well as the complexities and sheer scale of urban development. Yes, there certainly was scope for a new view of Cheltenham’s past.
Anthea is the author of Cheltenham: a new history
Read all about “Cheltenham’s Own” Anthea Jones in September’s edition of The Cheltonian.
Find out even more about Cheltenham’s hidden history by visiting the author’s blog at http://cheltenhamnewhistory.blogspot.com.
