Gordon Knowles

Review of Bournemouth Rock

The Bournemouth Air Festival took place from the 3...

The Bournemouth Air Festival took place from the 30th August to 2nd September 2018. Voted the best Tourism Event by Visit England and celebrating its 10th year, the Bournemouth Air Festival is the UK s biggest, best and free aviation festival. RAF Red Arrows displayed on ~ Thursday 30th August ~ Saturday 1st September.
Bournemouth. With seven miles of golden sands and sparkling sea, the vibrant cosmopolitan town of Bournemouth has it all - a vast variety of shops, restaurants and holiday accommodation, buzzing nightlife and endless countryside with beautiful award-winning gardens and water sports galore. Bournemouth is a large coastal resort town in the county of Dorset, England. According to the mid-year estimates for 2010 from the Office for National Statistics the town has a population of 168,100, making it the largest settlement in Dorset. It is also the largest settlement between Southampton and Plymouth. With Poole and Christchurch, Bournemouth forms the South East Dorset conurbation, which has a total population of about 400,000.

Bournemouth was founded in 1810 by Lewis Tregonwell after which Bournemouth's growth accelerated with the arrival of the railway, becoming recognised as a town in 1870. Historically part of Hampshire, it joined Dorset with the reorganisation of local government in 1974. Since 1997 the town has been administered by a unitary authority, meaning that it has autonomy from Dorset County Council. The local authority is Bournemouth Borough Council. Bournemouth's location on the south coast of England has made it a popular destination for tourists.
Bournemouth is located directly to the east of the Jurassic Coast, a 95-mile ( or 153 kilometres ) section of beautiful and largely unspoilt coastline recently designated a World Heritage Site. Apart from the beauty of much of the coastline, the Jurassic Coast provides a complete geological record of the Jurassic period and a rich fossil recorded area. Bournemouth seafront overlooks Poole Bay and the Isle of Wight. Bournemouth also has seven miles ( 11 kilometres ) of sandy beaches that run from Hengistbury Head in the east to Sandbanks and Poole, in the west.
The Dorset and Hampshire regions that surrounded Bournemouth had been the site of human settlement for thousands of years. However, in 1800 the Bournemouth area was largely a very remote, barren and sometimes very dangerous heathland. No one lived at the mouth of the Bourne River and the only regular visitors were a few fishermen, turf cutters and gangs of smugglers until the 16th century. During the Tudor period the area was used as a hunting estate, Stourfield Chase, but by the late 18th century only a few small parts of it were maintained, including several fields around the Bourne Stream that runs through the Gardens now in Bournemouth town centre and a cottage known as Decoy Pond House, which stood near where the Square is today. A place well liked by Smugglers in those perilous times.