Jane Austen's England — and Hampshire in particular — are being lauded in the anniversary year of the author's birth. And quite rightly so, says Kate Green.
In case you are wondering, the place to go on holiday this year is, according to The New York Times’s 50 places to visit in 2025, Jane Austen’s England. Yes, Hampshire trumps the Galápagos Islands, New York’s own revamped museum spaces, the Indian state of Assam, White Lotus Thailand — and Greenland. The next European destination listed is Cézanne’s home town of Aix-en-Provence, France, in seventh place.
The Austen salutation cites, of course, celebrations for the 250th anniversary of her birth, many of which are in Hampshire, at her birthplace of Steventon, her brother’s home at Chawton and her grave in Winchester Cathedral. Austenmania shows no signs of abating and Hampshire, a county rarely mentioned in the same breath for holidays as Devon or Norfolk, should make the most of it.
Away from the rat-runs to the capital, it’s a county of quiet enchantments: buried farms, tiny lanes, squat, rural churches, such as atmospheric, whitewashed, 11th-century St Hubert’s, Idsworth, planted in the middle of a field. Its landscapes include the 1,000-year-old New Forest, where fallow deer, ponies and pigs wander and ancient commoning customs prevail. Its clear chalkstreams, inspiration for Charles Kingsley’s The Water-Babies, are paradise for fishermen; its mystical, high barrows, where racehorses gallop on the skyline, were the playground of the rabbits of Watership Down; its rippling grasslands are strongholds of chalk hill blue butterflies, bee orchids, skylarks and hares. The 70-mile Wayfarers’ Walk takes the wanderer from high on the west Berkshire border down to the Solent coast.
“Hampshire is having its big moment”
Roses bloom at Mottisfont Abbey, rhododendrons at Exbury; boats bob on the Hamble as motorcars roar at Beaulieu. In St Mary’s Church in Selborne, an enchanting stained-glass window features naturalist Gilbert White’s tortoise, Timothy; top-class opera echoes over the water meadows where owls swoop beside The Grange, Alresford; high-octane polo is played at Tidworth and county cricket at the Utilita Bowl in Southampton. Izaak Walton, of The Compleat Angler fame, has a pub named after him in East Meon; cricket’s hero Thomas Lord does in West Meon.
Austen set Mansfield Park in Hampshire and had her heroine Fanny Price living in the naval base of Portsmouth, where Charles Dickens, a son of the city, depicted Nicholas Nickleby serendipitously finding theatre work. P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster were regular visitors, including to the fictional Deverill Hall in The Mating Season. The Mountbattens, de Rothschilds, Guinnesses, Carnarvons, horticulturalist Sir Harold Hillier, painter Susie Whitcombe, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, broadcaster Esther Rantzen, Olympic eventer Lucinda Green and garden supremo Alan Titchmarsh have all made the county their home — and little wonder. It seems that Hampshire is having its big moment.
This piece appears as the leader article in Country Life’s issue of January 22, 2025.
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