The town is strung out on hairpin bends winding down to the sea
What’s going for it? Long before the climate emergency, those in the 19th century without a posting in Delhi or Singapore would come to Ventnor to experience the tropics. The town is a world apart, sunbathing alone beneath its own vast windbreak, St Boniface Down, with just the ocean for company. Its famed microclimate was catnip for Victorians. Consumptive patients desperately sucked in its warm, moist air at the Royal National Hospital for Diseases of the Chest; botanists and ecologists chased its rare butterflies, lizards and odd flora, a lost world or Galápagos just south of Newport; thrill-seekers explored Blackgang Chine, Britain’s oldest theme park; and the rest of them hit the bandstand for tea, cake and a shimmy. It remains a defiantly Victorian place, but having had its dose of inevitable seaside decline, in recent years it has acquired a light hipster sheen. There’s a lot of upcycling, vintage and keeping-calm-and-carrying-on going on, a fair amount of William-Morris-meets-mid-century-modern and a cultural scene in rude health. Though I do worry for that microclimate. Might get a tad Saharan, now the rest of the UK is turning tropical.
The case against Barely a flat surface, it’s awfully steep pretty much everywhere. Despite recent improvements, it still suffers from a seasonal economy.
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