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An Introduction to Tivoli
Andover Road from the Green
Perhaps the earliest mention in print that we have of Tivoli is to be found in the ‘Cheltenham Looker On’ for 1834, where Tivoli is included in a survey of new buildings in the town. Three buildings were under construction and four had been completed but not yet occupied. These properties were in what is today Tivoli Road – then just referred to as Tivoli.
Tivoli is part of an estate once belonging to the Earl of Essex, later purchased from him by local Solicitor John de la Bere, and then at the turn of the 18th century, and later sold again by his son, this time part to the Earl of Suffolk and part to Henry Thompson, a wealthy merchant from Middlesex. What is known as Tivoli today straddles both of these purchases and the street pattern follows very closely the field boundaries in the de la Bere sale plans.
Davies’ Guide to Cheltenham of 1843 refers to the building boom of the previous ten years when new buildings arose ‘with a rapidity perfectly surprising’ between 1831 and 1841 in Tivoli and other areas of private residences. The contemporary account in the ‘Cheltenham Looker On’ referred to above, remarks that:
'Along the line of the rail road fronting Westal an entirely new town appears rapidly springing up and already fifteen neat houses are either wholly or partially built. These are intended for the accommodation of persons in the middle ranks of life, who will here be enabled to pursue their respective callings, and by the establishment of shops, prove a great convenience to this increasing neighbourhood.'
Tivoli is part of an estate once belonging to the Earl of Essex, later purchased from him by local Solicitor John de la Bere, and then at the turn of the 18th century, and later sold again by his son, this time part to the Earl of Suffolk and part to Henry Thompson, a wealthy merchant from Middlesex. What is known as Tivoli today straddles both of these purchases and the street pattern follows very closely the field boundaries in the de la Bere sale plans.
Davies’ Guide to Cheltenham of 1843 refers to the building boom of the previous ten years when new buildings arose ‘with a rapidity perfectly surprising’ between 1831 and 1841 in Tivoli and other areas of private residences. The contemporary account in the ‘Cheltenham Looker On’ referred to above, remarks that:
'Along the line of the rail road fronting Westal an entirely new town appears rapidly springing up and already fifteen neat houses are either wholly or partially built. These are intended for the accommodation of persons in the middle ranks of life, who will here be enabled to pursue their respective callings, and by the establishment of shops, prove a great convenience to this increasing neighbourhood.'
So, Tivoli was born, and by 1845, Rowe’s Cheltenham Guide described it as a ‘fashionable suburb.’ Norman’s Guide of 1854 refers to ‘…the aristocratic districts of Lansdown and Tivoli’ and it was in the residents of these areas that the local traders saw the potential source of their survival, if not prosperity.
Andover Road is one of the earliest named roads in Tivoli, although up to the turn of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, it was named simply, Lippiate. Andover derives its name from the title of the eldest son of the Earls of Suffolk. From 1810, stone-carrying trucks trundled along Lippiate bringing gravel and stone from the quarries on Leckhampton. The trucks were pulled along metal lines and by 1838 23,000 tons of stone annually were passing along the middle of the road, in front of the new buildings that to which the above mentioned guide books refer. This road was called Tivoli Place by 1840 and became officially Andover Road post-1905. Tivoli Place indicated the properties that today include the shops and the two early 19th century terraces on the south of the Road, as far as the junction with St Stephen’s Road. These were all built on the part of the 1765 de la Bere estate named Westal Furlong. |
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