Spa Gazy

My mother recalls when Cheltenham was home to retired Indian Army officers and colonial civil servants. Sikh attendants in turbans. Ayahs wheeling perambulators. Connaught Place, New Delhi, dropped into colder climes.

Connaught Place has been spruced up, for the Commonwealth Games last year, after decades of post-imperial decline. Cheltenham remains shabby. No-one seems that bothered to uphold good taste in its environment. It lacks the badge of World Heritage status that keeps Bath finely balanced between commerce and conservation. Commerce has not had everything entirely its own way; much of central Cheltenham was designated a Conservation Area in 1973 but sadly the horse had already bolted. The concrete cage of the Quadrangle sits brooding on one corner of Imperial Square, while across it the 13 storeys of the Eagle Star building loom over the rooftops like the uncouth guest at a wedding. Among the cream-painted, grey-slated villas and terraces festooned with ironwork, modern blocks of flats poke up like weeds in a once-elegant border. The insensitivities of one generation will take centuries to mend.

In places, small-scale mistakes are being undone. One terrace (left) is a mixture of genuine Georgian and recent replica. One of the tallest houses was the home of Dr Edward Jenner, the pioneer of vaccination, stupidly demolished in 1969 and rebuilt 25 years later. The block to its right carries the date ‘2008’. If it has the advocates of brutal minimalism crying into their beer, so much the better.

What is ‘contemporary’ architecture? Any architecture that happens now, whatever its derivation. Never to copy is never to learn. To see the Strozzi Palace for real it is necessary to go to Florence. Cheltenham has its own (left), a copy in smooth industrial brick that dates from 1900 and started life as an electricity sub-station. It could have been so much less charming.

Regency Cheltenham is overlain on an older town with a mediæval, monastic past. Around the parish church, tall narrow buildings (left) hint at ancient burgage plots. A painting in the town’s museum shows it with timber-framed houses and a coaching inn (long before it became the 20th century’s great coaching interchange). Today's conjunction is a curious one: the orderly regularity of the neo-classical dictates the proportions of windows, doors and roof-lines, yet the buildings must conform to plots defined by the winding back lanes of an Anglo-Saxon ham. Such fragments of townscape are tiny in the context of the town but they need to be treasured. Is it too much to ask that where they have been lost a far-sighted council might make plans to put them back – as an education for architects and a delight for the eye?