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Winchester is a city, but you wouldn’t know it. It’s small enough that you can drag your wheeled suitcase from the train station into the town centre across pedestrian crossings marked by funny English golden globes atop striped poles.
They’re called Belisha beacons, if you’re ever asked in a pub quiz. Those and the curry shops are the first signs that Winchester is about to deliver abundant cliches of England.
A settlement was founded here in the Iron Age. The Romans came. The Anglo-Saxons made it the capital of Wessex. Alfred the Great based himself here in the 9th century. William the Conqueror was crowned in Winchester, which became a powerful commercial and church city under Plantagenets and Tudors.
To add slathers of further Englishness, Jane Austen staggered into town in 1817 to die in a lopsided yellow house on College Street. Two years later John Keats took a stroll along the river and was inspired to write his famous ode To Autumn.
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Jane Austen’s uninteresting tomb is in Winchester Cathedral. Your eyes will be pulled upwards by the fountains of stone that support the world’s longest medieval nave, and by the elegant Pre-Raphaelite stained-glass windows. The choir stalls are spiky with delicate wood carvings.
On the outside, the cathedral is aggressively Norman, with a squat tower rather than spire, but softened by the surrounding sward. (You’ll find yourself dredging up archaic words in Winchester.) The enclosed Cathedral Close presents the genial face of England, all honeyed stone and foxgloves and ladies in hats pedalling bicycles.
Wander past venerable colleges and gateways and the ruins of the bishop of Winchester’s former palace. From there footpaths wander off past cricket fields into water meadows. The River Itchen is clear as Bombay Sapphire; you can see tadpoles and slim fish and wavy fronds of water plants.
In town, you’ll find plenty of historical clutter in a convolution of truncated gateways, witch-hat rooflines and leaning walls. There’s a medieval monument topped by assorted saints and the Virgin Mary. The town has an old debtors’ prison too because why not add a Dickensian cliche as well?
You can also admire a whopping statue of King Alfred, or at least a Victorian fantasy of him in a fetching tunic and curly locks, his sword hilt upraised as if he’s directing traffic at the roundabout.
Winchester’s only failure – if you’re after stereotypes – is that it doesn’t have a castle, although Highclere Castle (aka Downton Abbey) is 35 kilometres away. The only part of Winchester Castle that remains is the 13th-century Great Hall, which claims the round table of Arthurian legend, a claim so improbable it might inspire you to recite some Monty Python.
You could care less and know nothing about English history and still enjoy this beautiful market town of burbling brooks, old bricks, leafiness and Georgian-era architecture. Along High Street you’ll find the shops of very English brands such as Clarks and Marks & Spencer, though a horror of fast-food outlets too.
More interesting independent shops are hidden elsewhere. P&G Wells on College Street has sold books since 1729. Its floorboards creak nicely, and you can settle into a red velvet armchair as you browse.
After a bite? The set lunch at Rick Stein’s seafood restaurant is decent value. The Chesil Rectory, hunkered inside a half-timbered, wobbly former pub, serves modern versions of mackerel and pigeon and apple sponge.
As for pubs, The Black Boy is eccentric English to an E, cluttered with an Aga stove, old dictionaries, a collection of spectacles, stuffed animals including a giraffe, and a very-much-alive dog. You expect Merlin or Henry VIII or Stephen Fry to be sipping ale by the fire, just to round off quintessential England.
THE DETAILS
FLY
Emirates flies from Melbourne and Sydney to London via Dubai. Winchester is 80 minutes by coach from Heathrow, or 70 minutes by train from Waterloo station in central London. See emirates.com
STAY
Embrace more Englishness at The Wykeham Arms, a former 1755 coaching inn with fine rooms above a pub that serves an excellent Sunday roast. See wykehamarmswinchester.co.uk
The writer travelled at his own expense.
