‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY: Judy Smith
The above words begin one of my very favourite books, The Go-Between, by LP Hartley, and standing in the main street of Malvern I couldn’t help thinking of them. Malvern belongs in the past, and its pace of life is very different.
Alright, there was a supermarket on one side of me and, around the corner, the theatre that originated in 1885 had just been given a glassy twenty-first century façade, but you could still feel it. Malvern’s soul is rooted in Victorian England.
This was a time when the great and good of the land came to partake of its newly discovered spa waters and Sir Edward Elgar and George Bernard Shaw would bump into each other on street corners. Well, they were both here at the same time.
We were in Malvern to catch up with friends, spend a little time in their area, and perhaps get some insider’s tip for what to see and do. After all, just about everywhere in the UK should have enough interest for a weekend – and in Malvern, where our friends have lived most of their lives, you could extend that weekend to a month. So where to begin?
The main street was the answer to that, where shops with quirky names like Rhubarb and Blueberry Button rub shoulders with equally strangely named galleries (Iapetus?), and tiny bookshops crammed with tomes of every kind jostle for space with antiques emporia and the odd latter-day bistros.
Add to that a little pedestrian area at the top of the street where you can avail yourself of the spring waters descending from the hill behind and admire a statue of the thickly moustached Elgar gazing out over the town that was his home for many years. Actually, there had been a Pride festival in Malvern the weekend before and Elgar was adorned with a Joseph-like coat of many colours. Nothing Victorian about that!
There’s nothing Victorian, either, about the handsome priory that stands in the centre of town.
The priory dates back a thousand years and has some splendid medieval stained glass, along with delightfully carved misericords in the choir stalls. We spent some time trying to work out those said to portray the labours of the month.
That main street could keep you entertained for hours, but we’d been told that for a real taste of Victoriana we should continue down it through leafy suburbs to the station. There can’t be a more elegant station than Malvern!
Its archi
