It’s fab to see that Ventnor gets a glowing mention in a new book about seaside resorts.
Author and journalist, Candida Lycett Green, says in the entry for Ventnor that she found the town to be ‘hauntingly romantic’.
Having been a commissioner of English Heritage for nine years, Candida knows a thing or two about the fragile beauty of Victorian towns.
“¦In its heyday Ventnor was primarily a winter resort, its season lasting from October until June or July. The sheltered, south-facing town was said to be sunnier and warmer than anywhere else in the country, and when Sir James Clark (later Queen Victoria’s doctor) published a treatise on the influence of climate in the prevention and cure of chronic disease, Ventnor’s popularity soared”¦.
“¦Today, despite half the Victorian town being lost to bombing, landslip and redevelopment, Ventnor is still wonderful. A natural waterfall crashes down a mossy rockery under the 1930s Winter Gardens, and the old cinema is now a stylish Thirties-style apartment block. The town is also hauntingly romantic “¦ Karl Marx convalesced here over the last two winters of his life, Alice and Edward Elgar honeymooned here in 1889 and a year later Mahatma Gandhi stayed in Sheltons Vegetarian Hotel.
According to the Wikipedia entry for Candida, the daughter of Sir John Betjeman, as one of the founding contributors to Private Eye magazine, was described by the late Eye journalist Paul Foot as “the most beautiful woman in Oxford”. Quite an accolade.
See more from Candida’s Seaside Resorts.
