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town in Gloucestershire, England
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Cheltenham ( CHELT-ən-əm) is a historic spa town and borough adjacent to the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire, England. Cheltenham became known as a health and holiday spa town resort following the discovery of mineral springs in 1716, and claims to be the most complete Regency town in Britain. It is directly northeast of Gloucester.
The town hosts several cultural festivals, often featuring nationally and internationally famous contributors and attendees: the Cheltenham Literature Festival, the Cheltenham Jazz Festival, the Cheltenham Science Festival, the Cheltenham Music Festival, the Cheltenham International Film Festival, the Cheltenham Cricket Festival and the Cheltenham Food & Drink Festival. In steeplechase horse racing, the Gold Cup is the main event of the Cheltenham Festival held every March. It is also home to a number of leading independent schools, including Cheltenham College and Cheltenham Ladies' College.
Cheltenham is located at River Chelt, which rises nearby at Dowdeswell and runs through the town on its way to the Severn. It was first recorded in 803, as Celtan hom; the meaning has not been resolved with certainty, but latest scholarship concludes that the first element preserves a Celtic noun cilta, 'steep hill', here referring to the Cotswold scarp; the second element may mean 'settlement' or 'water-meadow'. As a royal manor, it features in the earliest pages of the Gloucestershire section of Domesday Book where it is named Chintenha[m]. The town was awarded a market charter in 1226.
Though little remains of its pre-spa history, Cheltenham has always been a health and holiday spa town resort since the discovery of mineral springs there in 1716. Captain Henry Skillicorne (1678–1763), is credited with being the first entrepreneur to recognise the opportunity to exploit the mineral springs. The retired "master mariner" became co-owner of the property containing Cheltenham's first mineral spring upon his 1732 marriage to Elizabeth Mason. Her father, William Mason, had done little in his lifetime to promote the healing properties of the mineral water apart from limited advertising and building a small enclosure over the spring. Skillicorne's wide travels as a merchant had prepared him to see the dormant potential on this inherited property. After moving to Cheltenham in 1738, he immediately began improvements intended to attract visitors to his spa. He built a pump to regulate water flow and erected an elaborate well-house complete with a ballroom and upstairs billiard room to entertain his customers. The beginnings of Cheltenham's tree-lined promenades and the gardens surrounding its spas were first designed by Captain Skillicorne with the help of "wealthy and travelled" friends who understood the value of relaxing avenues. The area's walks and gardens had views of the countryside, and soon the gentry and nobility from across the county were enticed to come and investigate the beneficial waters of Cheltenham's market town spa.
In 1795, Captain Powell Snell raised the First Troop of Gloucestershire Gentleman and Yeomanry (Royal Gloucestershire Hussars) at the Plough Inn (now Regent Arcade) in Cheltenham.
The visit of George III with the queen and royal princesses in 1788 set a stamp of fashion on the spa. The spa waters can still be sampled at the Pittville Pump Room, built for this purpose and completed in 1830; it is a centrepiece of Pittville, a planned extension of Cheltenham to the north, undertaken by Joseph Pitt, who laid the first stone on 4 May 1825.
Cheltenham's success as a spa town is reflected in the railway station, still called Cheltenham Spa, and spa facilities in other towns inspired by or named after it.
Alice Liddell and Lewis Carroll were regular visitors to a house in Cudnall Street, Charlton Kings – a suburb of Cheltenham. Alice Liddell's grandparents owned this house, and it still contains the mirror, or looking glass, that was purportedly the inspiration for Lewis Carroll's novel Through the Looking-Glass, published in 1871.
Horse racing began in Cheltenham in 1815 and became a major national attraction after the establishment of the Festival in 1902. The racecourse attracts tens of thousands of visitors to each day of the festival each year, with such large numbers of visitors having a significant impact on the town.
In the Second World War, the United States Army Services of Supply, European Theatre of Operations established its primary headquarters at Cheltenham under the direction of Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, with the flats of the Cheltenham Racecourse becoming a giant storage depot for countless trucks, jeeps, tanks and artillery pieces. Most of this material was reshipped to the continent for and after the D-Day invasion. Lee and his primary staff had offices and took residence at Thirlestaine Hall in Cheltenham.
The first British jet aircraft prototype, the Gloster E.28/39, was manufactured in Cheltenham. Manufacturing started in Hucclecote near Gloucester, but was later moved to Regent Motors in Cheltenham High Street (now the Regent Arcade), considered a location safer from bombing during the Second World War.
Cheltenham is situated just inside the edge of the Cotswolds, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in the South-West region of England. The small River Chelt flows under and through the town.
Cleeve Hill, overlooks the town and is the highest point in the county of Gloucestershire and the Cotswold Hills range, at 1,083 feet (330 m).
The town is near the northeastern edge of the South West of England region being 88 miles (142 km) west-northwest of London, 38 miles (61 km) northeast of Bristol and 42 miles (67.5 km) south of Birmingham.
The districts of Cheltenham include: Arle, Benhall, Charlton Kings, Fairview, Fiddler's Green, Hesters Way, Lansdown, Leckhampton, Lynworth, Montpellier, Oakley, Pittville, Prestbury, the Reddings, Rowanfield, St Luke's, St Mark's, St Paul's, St Peter's, Springbank, Swindon Village, Tivoli, Up Hatherley, Whaddon and Wyman's Brook.
The borough contains 5 civil parishes within its boundaries. These are Charlton Kings, Leckhampton with Warden Hill, Prestbury, Swindon and Up Hatherley. These all have their own parish councils who handle local services and planning with elected councillors.
Parts of the town has green belt along its fringes, and this extends into the surrounding Tewkesbury district, helping to maintain local green space, prevent further urban sprawl and unplanned expansion towards Gloucester and Bishop's Cleeve, as well as protecting smaller villages in between. West of the Greenfield Way and Fiddlers Green Lane roads, along with much of the open space up to the Civil Service Sports Ground, as well as the Cheltenham Racecourse and surrounding green park, along with St Peter Leckhampton parish church and Brizen Playing Fields/Haven and Greenmead parks along the south of the borough, are covered.
In May 2024, under plans by Gloucestershire County Council, it was reported that there are secret talks to formally merge the conurbations of Cheltenham and Gloucester with each other. The plans suggest that around ten new garden towns could be built around the green belt at Boddington which if removed would result in the complete merger of both boroughs. Doing so would facilitate and effectively merge the two into a supercity. The move has been criticised by both Cheltenham Borough Council and Gloucester City Council.
Cheltenham Borough Council is the local authority for Cheltenham; it is split into 20 wards, with a total of 40 councillors elected to serve on the borough council. Since 2002, elections have been held every two years with half of the councillors elected at each election.
Cheltenham was an ancient parish. Until 1786 it was administered by its vestry, in the same way as most rural areas. The vestry was supplemented by a body of unelected improvement commissioners in 1786 known as the Paving and Lighting Commission, initially charged with paving, lighting and repairing the streets, which later gained other powers including providing a watch and setting standards for new buildings. The commissioners were reformed in 1852 to be partly-elected and were eventually replaced in 1876 when the town was incorporated as a municipal borough.
On 1 April 1974, under the Local Government Act 1972, the borough of Cheltenham was merged with Charlton Kings urban district to form the non-metropolitan district of Cheltenham. Four parishes—Swindon Village, Up Hatherley, Leckhampton and Prestbury—were added to the borough of Cheltenham from the borough of Tewkesbury in 1991.
The head office of the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) is located in Cheltenham, to which it moved in 1951.
As with the vast majority of the British Isles, Cheltenham experiences a temperate oceanic climate (Cfb in the Köppen climate classification). It has warm summers and cool winters. The town held the British maximum temperature record from 1990 to 2003—temperatures reached 98.8 °F (37.1 °C). The absolute minimum is −4.2 °F (−20.1 °C), set during December 1981. During a typical year, 139 days will report at least 1 mm of rain, and some 35.5 nights will record air frost.
As a Regency spa town, tourism is an important sector in Cheltenham's economy, but it also has some light industry, including food processing, aerospace and electronics businesses. The Government's electronic surveillance operation Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), known for its "doughnut-shaped" building, is in Cheltenham. Vertex Data Science, GE-Aviation, Chelsea Building Society, Endsleigh Insurance, Archant, Nelson Thornes, UCAS (Universities & Colleges Admissions Service), Kohler Mira, Zürich Financial Services, Douglas Equipment, Volo and Spirax-Sarco Engineering all have sites in and around Cheltenham.
A number of design agencies and businesses are located in the town. Weird Fish and Superdry were both founded in Cheltenham, and Superdry plc is still based there. The multinational design house Meri Meri has its European headquarters in Cheltenham.
Cheltenham is a regional shopping centre, home to department stores, the oldest being Cavendish House, from 1823, and the Regent Arcade. Since 2006, Cheltenham is the headquarters of "The Movie Booth", a company that owns and operates DVD rental kiosks.
The Beechwood Shopping Centre in the town centre was demolished in 2017 to make way for a £30million, 115,000 square foot John Lewis store.
Among Cheltenham's many restaurants, two are currently Michelin one-star restaurants, Le Champignon Sauvage and Lumière.
The unemployment rate in Cheltenham was 2.7% in 2010 compared to the UK national unemployment level of 7.9%. The average GVA per head in Cheltenham was £21,947.27 in 2011 compared to the national average of £26,200.
In 2012, The Guardian found that, at the end of 2011, 41 multi-millionaires lived in Cheltenham, which was the fourth-highest rate in the UK of multi-millionaires per 100,000 people at 35.44.
According to the Office of National Statistics, employment in Cheltenham has decreased in comparison with the previous year. Cheltenham's employment rate was higher than across the South West as a whole in the year ending September 2023. The employment rate remains now at 81.3%, for ages 16–64. Unemployment (people looking for work) has risen since a year earlier. The most recent unemployment rate for Cheltenham was about the same as across the South West as a whole.
The town is known for its Regency architecture and is said to be "the most complete regency town in England". Many of the buildings are listed, including the Cheltenham Synagogue, judged by Nikolaus Pevsner to be one of the architecturally best non-Anglican places of worship in Britain.
Built in 1902 within the Imperial Square, Cheltenham Town Hall is a Grade II-listed building and features a plaque commemorating the coronation of King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra.
The Cheltenham Art Gallery & Museum, also called The Wilson, hosts a programme of art exhibitions running throughout the year. The Wilson was named after polar explorer Edward Wilson, who was born in Cheltenham.
In 2014, many of the town's historic cultural and leisure buildings were put under the control of The Cheltenham Trust, a charity set up to manage and develop the buildings on behalf of the town. Along with The Wilson, the Trust now manages the Town Hall, the Pittville Pump Room, the Prince of Wales Stadium and Leisure @, a large fitness and swimming complex. A volunteer board of Trustees controls the Trust.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Cheltenham”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.