OS Explorer map 205, Stratford-upon-Avon & Evesham: Alcester – I own this map, and had visited it before starting this blog. Visited again for this post 28th October 2023.
Google maps location links: Evesham, Stratford-upon-Avon, Shipston-on-Stour
Evesham
As mentioned a couple of times on the blog recently, Vesper and I moved house from Cambridge, over to Moreton-in-Marsh in Gloucestershire, in August 2023. Moreton itself is in map OL40, and 205 is an adjacent area to that, so I’ve now ended up here a few times while doing things nearby.
After moving to Moreton, I first came to this map area in late October. Moreton is a small town, with a population of about 5000, and there are several other towns on a similar scale nearby – Stow-on-the-Wold the nearest at only about 4 miles away, and all of Chipping Norton, Chipping Campden, Broadway, Bourton-on-the-Water and Shipston-on-Stour all within about 9 miles’ distance. Evesham, though, is the nearest place that’s really up a tier in size and amenities; being about 15 miles away with a population around 30k. (Further out, we then get Banbury and Stratford-upon-Avon in a similar tier to Evesham; before reaching Cheltenham, Oxford and Worcester up in a third tier of 100k+ people.) Evesham is also only 15 minutes away on the direct train line from Moreton, so with us not having a car, is the easiest place to go for certain things.
Something I like to do some weekend mornings is to leave the house quite early, and head over to a café to write some of this blog. Much as I enjoy writing the blog and, especially, having it to look back on, I often find it hard to get started and I write very slowly, often getting distracted, so that I’d say it typically takes three to four hours to write a post. I find that going out to a café for a long morning is a good way to get one done, while also feeling nicely distinct from work – whereas being on my computer at home is exactly the same thing I do for most of the week for my job. And it gives a nice satisfying shape to my day: I can come home at lunchtime, having done a big thing, been out of the house, and still have the whole afternoon ahead of me to laze around.
For a long morning of tapping away at my computer, I like to go to some big chain cafe, somewhere where there’s a nice, quiet, tucked-away corner where I can sit for a few hours; and which is non-busy enough that I won’t feel I’m costing them money by taking up a table for hours having just bought one drink. I never quite feel comfortable getting out my laptop in independent coffee shops; it just feels rude somehow, and somehow especially so in a small place where I’ll be in the gaze of the baristas. So chain cafés it is. Chains are also generally better at opening nice and early even on weekends – if I can get started before eight that’s ideal! When I lived off Milton Road in Cambridge, I’d usually walk over to the Starbucks on Fitzroy Street outside the Grafton Centre, which opens at 7am even on a Sunday. Towards the end, the person who works there on a Sunday morning got to know my regular order – a medium chai latte but with only 2 pumps of chai syrup instead of 3!
Fast forward to me living in Moreton, and I’d identified that my best bet was probably the Costa in Evesham. I could only really do it on Saturday mornings, since on Sundays the first train from Moreton to Evesham isn’t until 0921, which is a little late for me to get in a satisfying morning of blogging; but on Saturdays I could get the 0722 and it’d work well. [1] I duly headed over on the last Saturday in October, and the Costa worked well! I wrote up and posted my East London and Epping Forest post.
On this occasion, Vesper and I had decided to make a bit of a trip of it, and she joined me at about 11am so we could explore Evesham and have some lunch. I quite like Evesham! It sits on the river Avon, as in Stratford-upon-, and was the site of the pretty sizeable Evesham Abbey. In the centre of town now is the Abbey Park, containing a substantial part of the Abbey ruins, and the two town churches that remain in use from the Abbey buildings. The town is a nice mixture; it has some old, pretty little buildings – nothing hugely imposing, think more the occasional narrow alley and rickety half-timbered house – but also overall has a distinctly non-posh, slightly-but-not-too-tired feel. It feels welcoming and homely and I can tell I’m in the Midlands. Which makes sense, I suppose: it feels much more like the Northamptonshire towns near where I grew up, than like the places I’ve lived since then.
Vesper and I had a walk around the Abbey Park, where earlier that morning a very enthusiastic dog had kept depositing its frisbee near my feet, then when I threw it repeatedly refused to bring it back to its owner rather than to me; meaning I had to go and hide to let its owner get it back.
We then crossed the river, and walked from east to west around the wide meander that surrounds the town, over to the Hampton Ferry, which was fun; it’s a rope ferry.
We then settled into a café for lunch – a cheese and onion toastie for me – and then had a mooch around the shops, including the very fun Magpie Antiques, which is packed with an odd spectrum of antique items, old toys, souvenirs, and toys of the “cheap plastic modern tat” variety. After that, we hopped on a train back home. A nice little outing!
On that occasion, we decided not to go into the town museum, the Almonry, but I did so the very next Saturday, on another blog-in-Costa trip, and enjoyed it – there were some nice Anglo-Saxon coins, a fun model of the Abbey in its prime, and a big table map of the area showing movements around the Battle of Evesham overlaid on the present-day town and surroundings. The building itself is very cool, a nice rickety, winding medieval building. It was also actually focussed pretty much exclusively on the town itself, rather than having the all-too-frequent local museum assortment of (a) taxidermy and (b) second-rate, mediocrely-curated artifacts from around the world courtesy of some local Victorian collector/thief.
Stratford & Shipston
The above trip to Evesham was the visit that officially occasioned this blog entry, being, under The Rules, the first qualifying time I’d come to the map area since starting this blog. However, I also came to a couple of other places in the map area in the first few months after moving to Moreton – as well as going back to Evesham several times for café blogging and, in one case, to hire a car – which I’ll mention briefly here.
Shipston-on-Stour is a small town a few miles north of Moreton, and Vesper and I actually came here just a week or so after our move, before we came to Evesham. However, it’s in the overlap between the Evesham and Moreton maps, so didn’t itself count for visiting the Evesham map. We came in particular to go to Fosseway Furniture, which we loved – it’s a second-hand/restored furniture shop, run by the lady who does the restoration herself, and which I thought had some really good quality stuff at very reasonable prices. It’s also huge, in a big industrial unit, so they have plenty of stock. The prices are similar to new things at Argos, Ikea and the like, but of course much more solid and more to our taste, so a great discovery! I wish there were more shops like it around. We ended up buying a bedroom wardobe, and a fun little corner storage unit for our oddly big downstairs toilet room. [2]
Also in this map area is Stratford-upon-Avon, which I wandered around for about 45 minutes between buses, on the way from Moreton to Middle Tysoe for the third day of my walk from my parents’ house to Moreton, described on the blog recently.
Previous visits
I came to this map area pretty regularly in my early life, since between when I was about 8 and 16, my parents owned a cabin on a holiday park there. It was a two-bedroom, wooden cabin, on the Avon a couple of miles upstream of Stratford. I don’t really have any specific events to narrate, so I’ll just leave you with some photos!
[1] As I write, several months later in early May 2025, there are actually now a couple of better options. Firstly, in late March, I was really happy to see that, with some funding from Gloucestershire County Council, the 801 bus route that runs between Cheltenham and Moreton via Bourton-on-the-Water and Stow-on-the-Wold, had been upgraded from every 90 minutes to hourly, runs a bit later in to the evening, and importantly had been extended through from Moreton to Chipping Norton – a town which was previously a real pain to get to from Moreton on public transport despite being only ~8 miles away. Chipping Norton has a Costa and a Caffè Nero, and is only a 20-minute ride away on the new bus, which also stops very near my house in Moreton and the Nero’s in Chipping Norton; whereas with the train to Evesham there’s a 10-minute walk at each end. Now, it’d just be great if they’d further extend the 801 to run to Chipping Norton on Sundays too, and to run a couple of hours later still on weekdays, which’d make it possible to visit my friends Unicorn and Ex-Linguistician in Cheltenham for dinner – at the moment the last trip home to Moreton leaves Cheltenham at 18:30. Later trips would also mean we could go to the theatre in Chipping Norton. But still, the current improvements are nothing to sniff at!
Secondly, just today I learnt that the Soho Coffee in Moreton’s big Co-op seems to have extended its opening hours to open at 7am on Saturday, instead of the 9:30 that I thought it was before – though maybe I was just wrong about that. So a couple of new great options!
[2] That room would’ve been ideal to put our washing machine and dryer in, but unfortunately we couldn’t get our landlord’s permission to plumb them in, so the washing machine is in the kitchen and the dryer, non-plumbed, in an upstairs bedroom.
Visiting all the maps! 