A Stay in Ventnor, Isle of Wight by Jeremy Seal

We’ve called at Ventnor’s heritage centre where an elderly woman tells us she’s still got blackberries in the garden. The strawberries are flowering and there are lizards basking on the walls. Anywhere else in Britain, these mid-November nature notes could only have meant yet more evidence of global warming. But mild temperatures are nothing new to the Isle of Wight’s southernmost resort which is now bouncing back after decades of the deepest neglect.  

The same microclimate which first attracted Victorian writers and aristocrats, convalescents and consumptives – Ventnor was until 1969 home to the National Hospital for Tuberculosis – now looks set to revitalise the place as a year-round destination.  And with its rich history, architecture, scenery, food and live music scenes, there’s plenty to fill a weekend.  

Romantically Dramatic

Ventnor and adjacent Bonchurch village occupy the seaward terraces of the thickly wooded ‘Undercliff’ beneath the windbreak heights of St Boniface Down; romantically dramatic, precariously prone to landslip and sheltered to a fault. It’s the weather they bang on about more than anything in Ventnor, a town that only five years ago was not so much tired as terminal.

Now the booming jazz festival touts the place as the UK’s ‘Deep South’; mint juleps and ceiling fans, you might even imagine, not twenty miles from Southampton. If all this appears overly imaginative, then there’s abundant evidence of recovery, from the festival scene and the newly built harbour to the slew of recent hotel, restaurant and upmarket B&B launches.

We’re staying at the seven-bedroom Hambrough Hotel and restaurant which opened in an elegant townhouse above the new harbour in 2007. The hotel’s bar and restaurant are sunlit simplicity while the stylish contemporary rooms have DVD players and funky espresso machines, sybarites’ bathrooms and expansive sea views towards Normandy; ours also has a spacious balcony.

It’s a welcoming base in a town blessed with exceptionally diverse architecture; Victorian villas, weathered clapboard beach huts, thatched fishermen’s cottages, caravan-style holiday homes and even the odd Art Deco survivor from the town’s 1930s heyday such as the Winter Gardens venue hall. ‘Oh, the Winter Gardens.’ The lady volunteer at the heritage centre has a gleam in her eye. ‘The best dance floor in the south of England.’ 

Shabby-Grand Essentials

On this Saturday morning, however, a moribund flea market is taking place in the hall where the forthcoming attractions include a steady diet of clairvoyants’ evenings and Led Zeppelin tribute bands. Ventnor may be changing but not in its shabby–grand essentials.  The town, which ‘just brims with foibles’ according to the jazz festival’s musical director, remains a far cry from Bodenised Bembridge.

The character of the place is evident along the front where the sand and shingle beach is backed by a series of the quirkiest cultural collisions. A tangerine-tinged Italianate villa fronted by palm trees stands alongside the amusement arcade. There’s another such villa, so spectacularly derelict that it might be a snap-shot of Beirut, and a weatherboard cottage where a locally fashioned blue plaque casually records that Turgenev conceived  Fathers and Sons here in 1860.  It’s a reminder that a remarkable artistic crowd - Thackeray and Carlyle, Tennyson, Dickens and Macaulay, and latterly Winston Churchill and Elgar – were here the best part of a century before the spade ‘n bucket brigade.
 
We pass the famous Spyglass Inn, a cosy labyrinth of drinking nooks, and head out along the coastal path, cutting inland through oak woods wherever landslips have claimed the path. No road leads to Steephill Cove, a shoreline squeeze of thatched cottages and beachhuts hung with shell necklaces, worked pieces of driftwood and pirate flags. We clamber among lobster pots to buy famous pasties – filled with crabmeat, leeks and a little lemon juice – at the door of a private house known as Wheeler’s. 

At Home or Abroad

We climb up the path to emerge among verdant stands of palm and magnolias among clumps of bamboo. When the TB Hospital was demolished, the site was given over to Ventnor’s acclaimed Botanic Garden where gardener Simon Goodenough is fostering remarkable collections of plants from New Zealand and the Americas, Australia and South Africa. Even today, the Mediterranean garden reeks of sage and oregano.

Bonchurch lies on the other side of Ventnor, a sylvan dream of ponds and villas threaded by pathways, steps cut into the cliff and tinkling rills. The poet Swinburne lies in the churchyard and Winterbourne, recently refurbished as a fine B&B, was the manor house where Dickens wrote the first six chapters of David Copperfield in 1849; two truly great nineteenth-century novels, then, begun within a stretched stone’s throw of each other. Dickens called Bonchurch ‘the prettiest place I ever saw in my life, at home or abroad’. 

We dine at the Hambrough on bass landed just one hundred metres away. Then we take to our balcony. We don’t mean to linger; even Ventnor turns raw at midnight in November. But beyond the Cascade Gardens, a Victorian stream rockery topped by a walkway carried on a series of arches, the black sea carries the lights of distant ships heading down the Channel. And I feel a novel coming on.