Cheltenham (due in 2010)
Anthea JonesAn important and very interesting new addition to Carnegie's city and town history series. Our local history editor is very enthused by the chapters we have seen so far!
A visitor to Cheltenham appreciates at once the streets with Regency or early Victorian terraces, and the number of well-tended, colourful gardens and parks running through the town which open up long vistas between the buildings. The visitor may be less aware of the narrower streets of later eighteenth-century artisan houses, or the twentieth-century council developments, both of which are a significant part of the modern town. Large public buildings and institutions also impress.
The more energetic explorer will find the older village centres on the edge of the suburbs: Charlton Kings, Leckhampton, Prestbury and Swindon, which are separate parishes, and for their inhabitants have distinct identities. Smaller settlements within Cheltenham's historic parish have left traces in the place-names of the town: Arle, Alstone, Naunton, Sandford and Westal in the historic Cheltenham parish, Bafford and Ham in Charlton Kings, Broadwell in Leckhampton.
Behind most viewpoints is the backdrop of the Cotswold escarpment, rising within a few miles to its highest point, 1,000 feet, at Cleeve Hill. Cheltenham manor and parish had only a narrow neck of land giving its past inhabitants access to Cotswold hill pasture and woodland, and the parish and town is almost entirely in the wide valley of the Severn; its easiest communications were northwards to Tewkesbury and westwards to Gloucester. Not until the road improvements of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century turnpike commissioners made the ways onto the hills less difficult could Cheltenham become 'the gateway to the Cotswolds'.
Cheltenham ranked amongst the larger market towns in Gloucestershire during the seventeenth century; only the city of Gloucester and the parliamentary boroughs of Cirencester and Tewkesbury were larger and more varied in economic structure. Cheltenham changed from a market town serving an extensive agricultural manor and parish with its hinterland to a large residential spa in the short space of 50 years. In 1801 the population of Cheltenham parish was 3,076, and of the four surrounding parishes another 1,556; by 1851 Cheltenham had grown to 35,051, and the four other parishes to 6,858. The population of England and Wales doubled in the same period; Cheltenham had grown ten-fold.
The borough boundaries were gradually enlarged to take in parts of the parishes of Prestbury, Leckhampton and Charlton Kings. In 1931 the population of Cheltenham was 49,418 After the second world war, diversification of the economy brought with it fresh expansion, so that in 2002 Cheltenham had just over 90,000 people.
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