Bournemouth tourist information

The area of Poole, Bournemouth and Christchurch shows increasing congestion and some roads are very busy all day.

There is no motorway within the county of Dorset, although there is dual carriageway from Bournemouth Town Centre to the A31 dual carriageway leading to the M27 and London. Fast access may also be gained to the M4 north of Newbury, Berkshire.

National Express coaches serves Bournemouth Travel Interchange, Boscombe and Westbourne. There are frequent departures to London Victoria Coach Station. There are direct services to the West Country, Sussex coast (Brighton and Eastbourne), Bristol, Birmingham and the Midlands, the North West, and to Edinburgh and Glasgow. Flightlink serves Heathrow Airport with connections to Gatwick and Stansted Airports.

Local buses are provided by two rival companies, Wilts and Dorset and Transdev Yellow Buses. During the early summer of 2006 both of these underwent major changes of route and numbering, and visitors to the town are advised to check that they are on the correct bus when boarding.

Bournemouth is well served by the rail network with two stations in the town, Bournemouth railway station and Pokesdown railway station to the East. Parts of western Bournemouth can also be reached from Branksome station. Unfortunately, Bournemouth station is located some way from the town centre, due to the town's founding fathers not wishing to have a station within the town boundary, which extended 1 mile from the pier. The station was originally ¨Bournemouth East¨ with a second station serving the west of the town in Queens Road. (Poole station is by contrast near to Poole town centre). South West Trains operates a comprehensive service to London Waterloo with a journey time of as little as 1 hour 40 minutes. This line also serves Southampton, Winchester and Basingstoke to the East, and Poole, Wareham, Dorchester and Weymouth to the West. Virgin Trains serve destinations to the North with direct trains to Reading, Oxford, Birmingham and the Midlands, Manchester and the Northwest, Yorkshire, Newcastle, and Edinburgh and Glasgow. South Central Trains 'West-Coastway' services are available by changing at Southampton Central. The Sussex Coastal towns of Chicheser, Worthing, Hove and Brighton are served and trains continue to Gatwick Airport and London Victoria.

Going on a trip? Why not browse some of the luggage at eBags.com ^{(external source)}

Bournemouth International Airport is a short journey from the Town Centre - enabling passengers and freight to be flown directly to destinations in the UK and abroad. Taxis going to Bournemouth are available at the taxi stand on the airport and will bring you to town centre in approximately 10-15 minutes. A typical ride will cost anywhere between £10 and £15 pounds. Heathrow and Gatwick are accessible by car or coach. Ryanair operates scheduled flights to Glasgow (Prestwick), Dublin, Barcelona (Girona) and Pisa (Florence). In March 2005 The airport saw its second big budget airline setup base Thomsonfly.com which offers flights to Alicante, Amsterdam, Faro, Lanzarote, Lyon, Malaga, Palma Mallorca, Paris, Salzberg and Tenerife. Since 1993 Palmair have held their base at Bournemouth Airport as a charter airline offering charter flights to destinations on behalf of Bath Travel.

Your vacation. A time to lose yourself. And sometimes your luggage, too. Need Travel Insurance? Why not try Travel Guard ^{(external source)}

Bournemouth barely existed at the start of the 19th century. When retired army officer Lewis Tregonwell visited in 1810, he found only a bridge crossing a small stream at the head of an unspoilt valley (or 'chine') that led out into Poole Bay. An inn had recently been built at what is now The Square (centre of Bournemouth), catering both for travellers and for the smugglers who lurked in the area at night. Captain Tregonwell and his wife were so impressed by the area that they bought several acres and built a home, which is today part of the Royal Exeter Hotel. Tregonwell also planted pine trees, providing a sheltered walk to the beach. The town was to grow up around its scattered pines.

Bournemouth quickly became a destination for affluent holiday-makers and for invalids in search of the sea air. The site of Bournemouth had once been a hunting estate 'Stourfield Chase' but by the late 18th century only a small part of this was maintained: the 'Decoy Pond Estate' (now know as 'Coy Pond' and being wholly in the neighbouring historic town of Poole) comprising several fields around the Bourne Stream. In the 1840s the fields south of the road crossing (later The Square) were drained and laid out with shrubberies and walks. By the 1860s the fields to the north were also laid out with walks by the owners of the Branksome Estate. In the early 1870s all the fields were leased to the Bournemouth Commissioners, by the freeholders. These fields now form The Pleasure Gardens, which run through the centre of the town; although the former name of The Lower Pleasure Gardens is no longer officially applied to the area south of The Square. The immaculately tended gardens are still much-loved and the Central Gardens contain the town's impressive war memorial, guarded by two stone lions.

The War Memorial was installed in 1921, when the Borough Council moved to the Mont Dore Hotel adjacent, which it still occupies. Various building works were carried out - such as the Saint Stephen's Road bridge, to stamp the municipal identity on this area of the town, the war memorial was one of them. It was designed by Bournemouth's deputy architect Albert Edward Shervey, who copied the two lions, one sleeping, the other awake and roaring, from Antonio Cavona's lions which guarded the tomb of Pope Clement XIII.

A large sanatorium, overlooking the Central Gardens, treated patients with chest diseases. It has recently been re-developed as Brompton Court, a complex of retirement homes, preserving its remarkable chapel. Next to the sanatorium was built the magnificent Mont Dore Hotel, which is now the Town Hall. In the hotel's heyday in the 1880s it was renowned nationally and internationally for its sumptuous luxury which included possessing one of the first telephones in England - the number was "3". The hotel was then used during the war as a hospital to treat wounded soldiers.

Although the number of invalids sent to the town dropped in the late 19th century, the resort was still booming and its population increasing rapidly. As Bournemouth's popularity increased, the town centre spawned theatres, concert halls, cafés, cinemas and more hotels.

The town's first large entertainment venue was the original glass Winter Gardens, built in 1875 as the home of the town's municipal orchestra, (now the internationally renowned Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra). Elgar, Sibelius and Holst conducted there, but the acoustics were reputedly poor. In 1935, the original Winter Gardens was demolished. Its replacement, opened two years later, was intended as an indoor bowls centre, but by chance turned out to have superb acoustics, and after the Second World War it became the orchestra's new home. Before the opening of the BIC, the Winter Gardens welcomed just about every major entertainer of the day, including Maurice Chevalier, The Beatles, Pink Floyd and Morecambe and Wise. The building had been in decline since the late 1970s,and stood closed as the town council examined alternative uses. Then, despite a local vote and promises that it would be kept open, the hall was demolished in May 2006.

The Pavilion dates from 1925 and was built on the site of the former Belle Vue boarding house, one of the town's first buildings. Theatrical legends, including Ralph Richardson and Trevor Howard, played the Pavilion Theatre in its heyday. The Pavilion faces the cinemas and upmarket shops of Westover Road, which prides itself on being the town's "Bond Street".