Hidden treasure
Just turn aside from the remorseless traffic of the A1 and you discover a land that time forgot in Lincolnshire. Stephen McClarence reports from Stamford
After lunch in Stamford, we drive back north in the rain. We avoid the A1 and take a straggling road, little more than a lane and very typical of this bottom left hand corner of Lincolnshire. Mile after mile is lined by banks of cow parsley and high hawthorn hedges blooming with white blossom.
Past farms and woods and a track called The Drift, the road gradually winds its way off the edge of my map. We carry on without knowing quite where we're heading, the rain stops, the sun comes out and we turn a corner and seem to enter a rural Lincolnshire Wonderland. Beyond a gate, in a landscaped park, is a lake with swans in full galleon-glide; on the right is a gentle hill with a line of sheep trailing slowly down it. Over a bridge are a few cottages, but there's not a soul about. Silence and tranquillity.
The place is called Holywell, which sounds as enchanted as it looks, and we're later told that a grand country house stands in the middle of the park. We drive on and discover village ftes where vintage car enthusiasts are rolling up in 1960s Sunbeams and Humbers. If you were looking for a corner of England to delude yourself that time has stood still for the past half-century, this is it.
You could say the same for Stamford. It's a survivor of a more elegant age. With 600 listed buildings, this sturdy little market town with cobbled streets and fine Queen Anne Georgian houses became the country's first Conservation Area in 1967. It owes its survival partly to a local 19th century aristocrat who campaigned for the main London-Edinburgh railway line to call at Peterborough rather than Stamford. As a result, it avoided major Victorian development and most of its fine buildings survived, clustered around the languid River Welland and The Meadows, a sort of riverbank village green with weeping willows.
Sir Walter Scott was one of Stamford's greatest admirers. He reckoned it was "the finest stone town in England" and described St Mary's Hill, one of the main routes into town, as "the finest scene between London and Edinburgh". Turner painted that very view on a rainy day in 1828 (umbrellas add a homely touch) and it's still a fine scene, or at any rate it would be without the ceaseless flow of traffic.
Next to the busiest junction is The George, a coaching inn that's easily the classiest place to stay. With its sign bridging the road, it has charming bedrooms and creaking stairs and corridors that twist and turn between panelled dining rooms and a labyrinth of lounges and cosy corners.
As I meander through in the late morning, an old lady wearing a gent's tweed cap is sitting in state in a winged armchair with a large glass of red wine on the table next to her. Around her are cohorts of Daily Telegraph readers tut-tutting about MPs' expenses and plotting genteel revolution. Soon, Colonel Mustard will surely join them, sinking into one of the chairs for a siesta after his leisurely lunch in the Garden Room, a pleasant restaurant that gives the illusion of dining in a palm-filled greenhouse.
There's an arcade of small shops at the back of the hotel, selling such essentials as hand-painted satin shoes, and the reception area is dominated by a portrait of Daniel Lambert, "the fattest man in England" with a girth of 9ft 4in. Exhibited as "a natural curiosity", he died in Stamford in 1809 weighing 52 stone.
Stamford's five medieval churches dominate its skyline. They earn a mention in Nicholas Nickleby, when the book's hero is travelling north in a stagecoach. He passes through snow-bound Stamford, whose "old churches rose frowning and dark from the whitened ground". Fewer frowns today, particularly at the two most interesting churches.
St Martin's, built on the grandest scale, is celebrated for the towering tomb of Lord Burghley, Elizabeth I's Lord High Treasurer. He reclines in his official robes, his beard as stiff as his staff of state, his feet resting on a lion with nonchalantly crossed paws. A mile away, across a park (a pleasant walk) is Burghley House, his great creation.
Up the road and round the corner, St John the Baptist church, now in the care of the Churches Conservation Trust, has a stunning 15th century roof, from which angels with black and scarlet wings soar to eternity. A plaque commemorates St Malcolm Sargent, who was a chorister there. I study the visitors book and see I've just missed a couple from Mongolia. There's also St George's church, which anchors the town's most famous area, where the BBC filmed Middlemarch.
To match the five churches there are five second-hand bookshops. One is a specialist – Humm's internationally famous railway bookshop, with its 40,000 volumes aptly housed in the former stationmaster's house on the station (a good place to pick up a copy of An Illustrated History of Southern Pull-Push Stock or Nevada County Narrow Gauge).
The others, general stockists, include St Mary's Books, where I browse walls of Wisdens under the beady gaze of stuffed owls and geese. In the window, next to a Betjeman display, is a copy of The Golliwogg's Fox Hunt. "The most politically incorrect book in the world?" poses a sign in front of it. Stanilands has immaculate displays and smart Lloyd Loom chairs, and at the engaging St Paul's Street Bookshop, Jim Blessett is a great enthusiast for Stamford. "People say it's off the beaten track, but it's not," he says. "Going North or South, what a great place to stop."
A few doors up, Michael Thurlby echoes that thought: "The number of people who come in and say: 'I'd no idea the town was like this! The times I've gone past the Stamford sign on the A1...'" Thurlby has bought a former club and set out to create "the sort of pub you'd expect to find in Stamford". He dug up floors, stripped out panels and gradually revealed a 16th century house with warped beams and rooms incorporating the occasional 13th century arch. The result is The Tobie Norris, a pub-cum-restaurant named after a former owner. The Tudor atmosphere is so strong that, as I glance out of the window, the Stamford Hand Car Wash sign across the road comes as quite a shock.
That sort of juxtaposition is part of Stamford's appeal. It hasn't become just another quaint and moneyed backwater, a place of mere chocolate-box tweeness. For every classy shop offering "clothing and lifestyle for town and country", there's modern retail bustle on the pedestrianised High Street. From here, narrow alleys snake up to Broad Street, with its regular open market. Stamford is still a real town.
Even so, we go for lunch at Sam's Place, a tearoom serving good, inexpensive meals. It's in St Mary's Street, upstairs from Sinclair's upmarket gift shop, where a cabinet by the door displays the Spode Ladybird Archive Collection... mugs with the 1950s covers of What to Look For in Winter, The Wise Robin and Fun at the Farm printed on them. We're in Lincolnshire Wonderland again.
Stamford tourist information: 01780 755611 (www.discovereast midlands.com). The George hotel: 1780 750750 (www.georgehotelofstamford.com).
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Saturday 26 May 2012
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