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A Jerseyman Abroad: Andover

 


Why write of Andover? For a good deal of my holiday in England, I was staying with a friend who lives close to Andover. This was, therefore, the main town through which I had to pass wherever I travelled. It is not, however, a particularly notable little town, but as I found, it is not without some interest,

Andover is a sleepy little town, nestling in the heart of rural Hampshire. Now such a description may well conjure up pictures of an idyllic country village, where locals may play cricket on the green, then seek refreshment from a pint of ale in the warm surrounds of the local pub. In the case of Andover, such a description would be most unsuitable. Imagine instead a conglomeration of shops and businesses just lumped together in one place, varying widely in shape and architectural style, and looking rather like a jigsaw that has been put together wrongly. That is Andover!

How did such a town come to exist? Andover was once a place for the traveller to stop overnight, when taking the main road toward the North. You would break your journey here, take lodgings at the inn, while your horses were stabled and rested. It was not a rural community but a traveller's rest - a place where people would stay for two nights at the most before passing on.

Of course those days have long gone, and they have left Andover stranded, looking rather like a beached whale. Andover today has something of a crisis of identity. It would like to come up to date, with such modern amenities as a new library (which won a design award) and a new leisure centre. But somehow the creative spark is missing, and one gets the impression that nothing much ever happens in Andover, I recall a few lines of a poem which seems to sum up something of this town;

Where seasons fade, and no clocks chime
Amidst the desert emptiness of time