Basingstoke is a large town in north Hampshire, roughly halfway along the M3 motorway. It's simultaneously ancient and modern, a traditional market town selected by the London County Council for substantial postwar expansion which saw its population increase almost tenfold. It's now both a commuter hub and a commercial force in its own right, a sprawl of inoffensive estates where the car is king, and until this weekend was the largest town in southern England I'd never been to. Tourism is not its forte, let's be honest upfront, but there is sufficient stuff to see if you insist on making a day of it. [Visit Basingstoke][12 photos]
The best place to start is probably the Willis Museum at the top of the town, a collection founded by a former Mayor (whose name you can probably guess) which is now housed across three floors in the former Town Hall. Its claim to fame is that Jane Austen used to attend dances here in the previous building on site, the Mote Hall, and a statue of the great author was unveiled out front in the year of her bicentenary. Unfortunately this is also where the weekly market takes place which is why I found the poor woman corralled behind bins, a stack of empty fruit trays and a rack of potatoes. "You've come on the wrong day," said the adjacent fishmonger as he watched me struggling to take a photo, and I had to agree.
The Willis sensibly saves downstairs for its art gallery and cafe, while to find the rest you have to pass the talking Roman soldier and head upstairs. The town history bit is understandably mixed. Head way back and it's all antiquities and agriculture, with a particularly good sequence showing how poverty around the time of the Corn Laws led to a flight from fields to the town. The arrival of the railways brought more people to Basingstoke but it was that key London overspill decision which transformed everything, described at the time as "accelerated expansion... not a new town". I really liked the early 1960s living space lovingly arrayed with Ercol furniture, period tins, a dodgy gas stove and a teasmaid, even a copy of Living magazine, most of which I remembered from first time round. Be sure to grab a chunky Town Trail booklet if you want to explore the town centre properly, it's ace (or download a copy here).
Basingstoke's main street survives mainly intact, now pedestrianised but blessed by at least one former coaching inn and with the occasional heritage alleyway bearing off. The most consequential building is the long Edwardian emporium from which Thomas Burberry once traded. He opened his first drapers shop on Winchester Street in 1856, his business rapidly expanding after he chose to focus on resilient outerwear. The invention of gabardine in 1879 was a gamechanger, leading to Burberry providing trenchcoats for the British Army, jackets for Ernest Shackleton and ultimately naff tartan scarves for social climbers. These days Burberry House contains a Turkish restaurant and South Asian grocery and the nearest outlet is at Heathrow, but Thomas's heart remained in Basingstoke. I found his grave in the cemetery on Chapel Hill.
It's not a showy stone - the cemetery blurb describes it as rustic - tucked away by the outer wall where you'd never think to look unless nudged. In a retail coup the almost-neighbouring grave is that of Alfred Milward who brought shoe shops to hundreds of high streets and who also started out in Basingstoke trading from a cart. At the heart of the cemetery are the evocative ruins of the Holy Ghost Chapel, built as a burial place for Henry VIII's Chamberlain Lord Sandys and inexorably wrecked by generations of schoolboys using it as a playground. It's one of a handful of old churches around the town, chief of which is flinty St Michael's, another Tudor construction and the only Grade I listed building in the town centre. Most of its neighbours never outlived the 1960s.
A massively enlarged town needed a massively upgraded town centre, so it was controversially decided to replace almost everything between the station and the top of the town. The old streets became a brand new shopping centre, delivered sequentially as New Market Square, The Walks and The Malls, all carefully segregated from a slew of multi-storey car parks. The most recent addition is hospitality-focused Festival Place, completing a vast undercover retail playground you can walk round for ages. I thought those milling about reflected the overspill nature of the town and its modern service industries rather than the horsey rural crowd you might expect in other Hampshire towns. Such is the strength of the local economy there's hardly a closed unit in sight.
Buried beneath the shops are the headwaters of the tiny stream which carved the fairly obvious valley, the River Loddon which flows north from Basingstoke to join the Thames at Reading. It emerges somewhat artificially just beyond the roundabout and forms the spine of Eastrop Park, Basingstoke's favourite linear greenspace. Here I watched pedalboaters on the first lake, a heron eyeing up stupid fish in the second and two teenagers trying to net a few tiddlers where the river constricted again. Walk too far and you end up in very floodable Basing Fen, but from what I saw hardly anyone does that. The last stretch of the Basingstoke Canal once ran parallel to all this but that was filled in long ago, longer than you'd think, and the wharf at the end is now lost under the bus station.
Inner Basingstoke is conveniently encircled by a Ringway, and additionally sliced through the centre by another dual carriageway for impeccable road connections. These also provide access to a multiplicity of commercial districts added so that Basingstoke's workforce didn't all have to commute to London. Closest to the centre is Basing View, a thrusting business park filling the otherwise unliveable strip between the A3010 and the railway. It kicks off at a gargantuan Waitrose and rises past multiple anonymous office blocks which looked much emptier than the council might have hoped. At the far end is Fanum House where the AA has been based for 50 years but they've just agreed to move out... 200m down the road to Mountbatten House, a listed office block known locally as the Hanging Gardens of Basingstoke.
(no photo because I walked past without realising, dammit)
Basingstoke has two semi-outlying attractions, one very old and one pretending to be. The latter is Milestones Museum, a big grey shed full of period shops and vintage vehicles which describes itself as Hampshire's museum of living history. I've seen a fair few Victorian cobbled streets and bakers' vans in my time, and didn't feel the need to see their latest acquisition of 260 teddy bears, so saved £20 by skipping that. Meanwhile out east is Basing House, the largest private house in Tudor England, or rather what's left of it after Oliver Cromwell had his say. The Great Barn and the brick-lined fishponds remain in situ and the gardens are supposedly lovely, but I messed up by narrowly missing a very infrequent bus and that was another £10 saved.
What I did do is walk to another attraction a bit further out of town... past folk heading home with shopping, across a roaring dual carriageway, through streets all named after abbeys, past Saturday classes in a very 1980s church, through streets all named after islands, past peripheral newbuilds along the edge of a crescent haymeadow, past kids on mopeds roaring through woodland, along a grassy lane between undulating arable fields... really quite a lot further than I thought, and more of that tomorrow. Like I said, Basingstoke does indeed have sufficient stuff to see if you insist on making a day of it, and who'd have thought?
