My blogpal Joan Kyler recently mentioned that she had been to Cheltenham. (Where has Joan not visited? I asked myself. She’s seen far more of the UK than I have!) So when we were on our most recent trip to England and I realised that we weren’t that far from Cheltenham I thought we should rectify the situation and have a peek at Cheltenham too. No horse racing was involved, we just parked our car at the park and ride and got the bus into the centre of the town.

For some reason I’ve always had the impression that Cheltenham was rather posh, probably because I’ve only seen the racing on TV and then they are only focusing on people dressed up to the hilt in posh frocks and heels. Cheltenham is not posh at all, so that was a big surprise, it was very busy and had the same old same old shops and I got the worst meal with awful service that I can ever remember there. So it isn’t a town I would want to revisit at any time in the future although I’m glad we went to have a look at the place. Apparently The Promenade is famous and we thought we had missed it somehow but we later realised that we had actually been in it and hadn’t been impressed with the place, it didn’t seem at all special.

On the plus side we realised that the park and ride bus trip was really quite short so decided to walk back. This was only possible because I was with Jack as I have absolutely no sense of direction. It meant we could take some photos and we found Gustav Holst’s birthplace too. Here it is, quite a modest house situated off the main street into town.

This is Cheltenham’s Pittville Pump Room. I think this is the back of it. It’s available for hire, a good venue for a wedding I imagine.

This is part of a very smart Georgian/Regency terrace, presumably brick built underneath the plaster covering, different from Edinburgh’s terraces because of course they are made of stone. We may be blase about Georgian buildings as Edinburgh has so many of them.

In commom with just about all English towns it seems, there are a lot of art deco and 1930s style houses on the outskirts of Cheltenham, so that suited Jack with his love of art deco. There must have been an explosion of house building in the 1930s, and we always think of that as being a terrible time what with the depression and everything.

So if they could build houses then, why can’t they do it now? Surely it would help to get the economy moving again, here we are in a double dip recession, as I predicted and all they can think about is taxing us more.

Whoops – I nearly went into rant mode there. Anyway, that was Cheltenham