A brush with history, and an upcoming birthday bash, in Hampshire
Finding Jane… Peggy, Stanley, Edward and Thomas
For anyone tempted into Hampshire next year, to join-in the county-wide celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of the birth of Jane Austen, this is a two-day route that can turn the pages of a literary day visit into a bigger picture of the county’s cultural offering…
First stop is the breath-taking Sandham Memorial Chapel in Burghclere, Hampshire - home to arguably the most important series of paintings by British artist, Stanley Spencer, who wanted to express his military experience during 'The Great War' in paint.
The 19 oil paintings that cover three walls of the chapel took six years to complete and are considered by many to be artist Stanley Spencer's finest achievement. With the chapel built to honour the 'forgotten dead' of the First World War, who weren’t remembered on official memorials, the series of artwork was inspired by Spencer’s own wartime experiences as a medical orderly at the Beaufort Hospital in Bristol and both orderly and soldier on the Salonika front.
Spencer did for WWI what Picasso would later do for WWII with his painting of Guernica – albeit, with completely different emotional charges. Called by some ‘Britain’s Sistine Chapel’, Spencer’s magnum opus was inspired by the Arena Chapel, in Padua, which was frescoed by Giotto in the 14th century.
Driving deeper into the county, Petersfield is a lovely market town with strong literary and artistic connections to poet Edward Thomas, and - perhaps much more surprising - American art collector, bohemian, and socialite Marguerite "Peggy" Guggenheim.
One of the main highlights of any visit to Petersfield is to step inside its Museum and Art Gallery. Established in 1999, the Museum recently underwent a multi-million-pound transformation, and is located in a Victorian police station and a magistrates’ courthouse.
The Museum tells the history of Petersfield and its neighbouring villages over the last 10,000 years through several collections - including the Bedales Collection of historic dress, the Flora Twort Collection of paintings, the Don Eades Collection of photographs. It’s also ‘home’ to the Flora Twort Gallery, where artwork by international and local artists is displayed in an ever-changing cycle of exhibitions which change four times a year.
Recent exhibitions have included ‘Paula Rego: Literary Inspirations’ and ‘Alison Crowther and Kate Boucher: Traces in the Landscape’. The latest, finishing 5 October 2024, is Peggy Guggenheim: Petersfield to Palazzo, which celebrates the fact that Guggenheim lived and worked here, in Hampshire.
Opposite the Museum, Josie’s of Petersfield also comes highly recommended. A little taste of New York in the narrow streets of Petersfield, it’s a Greenwich Village style coffee shop serving a terrific range of food, including its renowned pancake stacks.
One suggestion for overnight accommodation in the area is at a West Meon pub with rooms-in-the garden.
The Thomas Lord doffs Hampshire’s cap to the fact that he was an English professional cricketer who played first-class cricket from 1787 to 180. One of the world’s most famous cricket grounds, owned by Marylebone Cricket Club carries his name to this day.
Lord’s itself has a long and storied history dating back to 1787, but it is the unassuming Hampshire village of Hambledon which is considered the birthplace of the noble sport; and it is West Meon where Lord died and was buried. Rooms at The Thomas Lord start from around £140, which also includes breakfast - and a full over of cricketing history.
West Meon is something of a rarity, even by Hampshire’s standards. With its award winning-village shop and The Thomas Lord on one side of the A32, and St John the Evangelist Church on the other side, it’s larger and grander than you’d expect from a cursory glance at the map, and - adding to its claim to fame - is that this is not only where the remains of Lord’s founder Thomas Lord can be found, but also where Cold War Soviet spy Guy Burgess’s ashes were interred at a family grave.
In a Regency nutshell, Jane Austen's House is a small independent museum in the village of Chawton near Alton, which now welcomes thousands of visitors every year from all parts of the globe.
The spirit of place is embedded deep within the fabric of the building, which is described as a cottage, but is actually a sizeable property where Austen was at her happiest during her brief life. It was here she wrote all of her famous novels, and almost completed a novel before she died at the age of just 41...
The room where she first read out-loud passages of her first published novel, Pride and Prejudice, the tiny wooden table where she wrote all her famous novels, and a ring she wore are just three of the hair-on-the-back-of-the-neck moments that visitors on a self-guided tour of her former home can expect here. And, better still, next year marks the 250th anniversary of her birth, which is set to feature a year-long multi-faceted birthday bash across the county.
From there, it’s on to New Alresford. A lovely market town with a thriving high street, independent shops and plenty of well-marked walks, it’s also ‘home’ to The Watercress Line - a preserved railway line which celebrates the trade between Hampshire and London when so much fresh watercress from the county’s chalk streams were shipped to the capital.
Having tea and sticky buns on the platform, while waiting for the arrival of the 11.34 from Alton is a rare treat - and with the hiss of the steam train, the clanking of its wheels and the chatter from inside the tearoom, a chance to turn the clock back to the days of Brief Encounter.
A tour of Hampshire’s Jane Austen Country can be continued in Winchester, just a 20-minutes car journey away.
Aim for Chesil Car Park, and it’s easy to find scenic walk alongside the fast-flowing Itchen, to a college-and-Cathedral quarter of the city. Walk past 8 College Street where she died, stop off at what is possibly Britain’s oldest bookshop, and it’s then a lovely walk around the Cathedral grounds to its front entrance.
It’s here where the memorials to Jane’s life and work are now found.
She was buried in the north nave aisle of Winchester Cathedral under a memorial stone, which mentions ‘the extraordinary endowments of her mind’ but which fails to pay tribute to her extraordinary achievements as a novelist. But, by 1900, a public subscription paid for a more fitting memorial window above the brass plaque.
Our Cathedral guide pointed out that most groups can’t get enough of her story; and when someone asked of there were memorials to other famous people, his answer was simple: “No-one more famous than her”.
The milestone anniversary presents a significant opportunity to bring her legacy to even greater prominence in Hampshire, where she was born and spent most of her life, and in Winchester, where she died. And in 2025, the unveiling of a new Jane Austen statue will take place in the surrounds of the Cathedral Close.
Winchester has been named in listings of the best places to live in Britain for years; and a stroll around its streets gives an instant indication of why.
That stroll around the city concludes the two-day trip, seeking out some of the best-known names in art and literature connected with Hampshire.
They say that the biggest evidence that only a very few people can command a first-name ‘brand’. So let’s hear it for Hampshire’s Jane. And for Peggy, Stanley, Edward and Thomas.