History and Heritage
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People have lived in the area now called Bournemouth since at least the Late Upper Palaeolithic when there was a reindeer hunters’ camp at Hengistbury Head. By 1800, there were farms within the heathland at Stourfield and Littledown. Most people, however, lived in the hamlets along the Stour valley between Wick and Kinson. Apart from Kinson which was in Dorset, the area was mainly within the parishes of Holdenhurst and Christchurch. The Bourne stream gave local fishermen and smugglers a place to beach their boats and an easy route inland to Kinson and past Hurn. The 1802 Christchurch Inclosure Act allowed local landowners to buy large areas of the heathlands. Lewis Tregonwell leased land from Sir George Ivison Tapps in 1810 and built ABOVE his house (now the Royal Exeter Turbary Common – part of the original Hotel). By 1838, the marine village of heathland from which the local people Bourne opened its first hotel. In 1856, collected fuel, especially turves the Bournemouth Improvement Act allowed the town to start its separate existence. LEFT Extract from the 1805 Enclosure map showing the location of Tregonwell’s house and the Bourne stream HISTORY AND HERITAGE This Theme includes the following Sub-Themes. Historical setting The Christchurch Inclosure Act 1802 The Early Road Patterns The Marine Village Establishment as a town The Tithe Map It also includes as an Appendix the tithe apportionments for Holdenhurst, Kinson and the parts of Christchurch which much later became Bournemouth Historical setting The village of Holdenhurst has been described as the Mother of Bournemouth. Arguably the real mother of Bournemouth is the Bourne stream. It has two tributaries. The first rises near Loewy Crescent south of Ringwood Road South and trickles east into Bourne Bottom south of Wallisdown Road. It runs through Alder Hills nature reserve and under the embankment of the mainline Bournemouth to Poole railway. It emerges into the upper reaches of the Bourne valley gardens. The other tributary rises near Rossmore Community College and today emerges from a culvert that joins the Bourne stream below Coy Pond. The enhanced more swiftly flowing stream is canalised as it flows through the Upper, Central and Lower Gardens. The final section is culverted before it flows into the sea. Double Dykes separates the site of the Iron Age settlement from the residential housing on the edge of Bournemouth The landscape which has become Bournemouth contains many traces of its earliest occupants, from the Bronze Age onwards. Few stayed for long, but their presence is preserved in street names such as Thistlebarrow Road. The most distinctive evidence of this long presence of humans is at Hengistbury Head, the last area to be integrated into present-day Bournemouth in 1932. A Stone Age (late Upper Palaeolithic) Reindeer Camp dates from about 12,300 years ago when the climate was colder and sea level was lower so that the headland overlooked broad river valleys rather than the sea. By the Iron Age, sea level had risen to its present level, and an area enclosed by the earthworks at Double Dykes was an active port and trading place, perhaps the first ‘town’ in the area. The present town’s name, “La Bournemowthe”, was first recorded in 1406. After the Norman Conquest in 1066 all the land in England became the property of the monarch. King William I undertook an audit of his lands for tax purposes which became known as the Domesday Book. King William gave parcels of land to the lords and barons in return for their loyalty. Under the feudal system the lords in turn gave land to tenants in exchange for services such as labour, goods and produce and military service when necessary. An estate or manor might consist of a manor house, several tenant farmers and a mill. Both Holdenhurst and Kinson are recorded in the Domesday Book and each had a flour mill. Histories of Bournemouth all-too frequently suggest that the landscape on which the town was built was uninhabited waste land, but this is far from the truth. The economy of the area was a rural one, dependent on the seasonality of agricultural life. The best agricultural land was the fertile strip of land along the flood plain of the River Stour. The settlements at Wick, Tuckton, Iford, Holdenhurst, Throop, Muccleshell, Muscliff, Redhill, Ensbury, Kinson and Cudnell were part of a pastoral way of life that hadn’t changed for centuries. The people living in these villages would have access to the valuable resources of the sea for fish and access to the heath. Every manor had waste land which was part of the economic life of the community. It would be a place to graze pigs and cattle, gather heather and bracken for animal bedding, shared resources for communities to live and work from. Most important of all was the right to dig turf and gather wood for fuel. For many people it was not always a rural idyll but an existence of borderline poverty. The Christchurch Inclosure Act 1802 Enclosure was the means by which areas of land were divided into smaller units and enclosed by fences and hedges. Many of the former open fields of medieval villages had previously been divided and enclosed but the enclosure movement of the 18th and 19th centuries resulted in the extensive redistribution of land. At the turn of the 19th century England was at war with France. There was a genuine fear of invasion or that Napoleon Bonaparte would block the English ports leading to starvation. Enclosing the waste land would increase the production of food. Common land could only be enclosed by Act of Parliament. In 1801 several local landowners including the Lord of the Manor of Christchurch, Sir George Ivison Tapps, presented a bill to Parliament for enclosure of the common and wastelands in the neighbourhood of Christchurch. This was the area that would eventually become the modern town of Bournemouth. The bill received the Royal Assent and three Commissioners were appointed to prepare the enclosure Award. The Award was completed in 1805 and set out the new allotments of land. Each plot of land was identified by a number on a map that related to an accompanying Schedule. For each plot the Schedule would state the landowner’s name, extent of holdings and nature of the tenure. The result was that major landowners in the area suddenly gained hundreds of acres of new freehold land at virtually no cost to themselves. The area subject to the Inclosure Act (5084 acres 1 rood and 9 square perches) was divided into 241 plots. 29 plots were set aside for roads, mainly along the existing tracks, and 15 acres of gravel pits to supply road-building materials, plus one for clay. Just over 1258 acres were sold to meet the expenses of administering the Act. Seven individuals bought them for for a total of £4100 14 shillings and 11 pence. Sir George Ivison Tapps, Lord of the Manor, who lived at Hinton Admiral, bought 205 acres and was allocated a further 240 acres as compensation for loss of rights and interest in soil and the loss of common rights. William Driver bought 236 acres at Redhill and Moordown and Philip Norris acquired 152 acres at Boscombe and Strouden. The Earl of Malmesbury who lived at Hurn (or Heron) Court bought 59 acres and was allocated 316 acres in lieu of tithes. William Dean acquired just over 500 acres on the West Cliff and around King’s Park. He paid £1 and 8 shillings per acre, much less than Tapps who paid £5 and 2 shillings per acre. About 40 people gained land as a result of the enclosure, but the two most important were the main Sir George Ivison Tapps and William Dean, with 1149 acres 2 roods and 34 square perches and 1137 acres and 14 square perches respectively. Although their lands were managed quite differently, both had very significant impacts on the future layout and development of the town. A quite different outcome was when the Commissioners allocated nine strips of five acres each at the top of Richmond Hill to three widows, Mary Vincent, Mrs Tarrant and Martha Watton and three labourers, William Troke, Peter Wareham and William Dowden, all from Muscliff. The heath had been used by villagers for cutting turf for fuel and they feared that this ancient right would be lost when the heath was enclosed. William West an educated man who farmed at Muscliff was persuaded to put their concerns to the Inclosure Commissioners. Farmer West was successful in proving their claims and the Commissioners allocated five areas totalling 424 acres as turbary, or turf for fuel, to the occupants of 86 qualifying cottages. It was not to be used for grazing animals. The land was to be held in trust for them by the Lord of the Manor. Turbary Common in Kinson – one of the original areas used for collecting turves In the short term the major landowners had little money to spare to improve the land and even less incentive when Napoleon was defeated at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The soil was poor, It could grow gorse, heather and some grasses but certainly not crops or cereal for bread. Sir George Tapps laid out large plantations of pine trees as an alternative. A contemporary account reports that poorly paid labourers planted thousands of trees, but hardly cared whether the branches or roots went into the soil first. Sir George might well have seen Lewis Tregonwell’s interest in buying several acres to build a house as a better use of.this otherwise unproductive land.