The Festival Town: Local Secrets, Regency Rules & Honest Stories from Cheltenham
My neighbour is seventy-seven, born in Charlton Kings, and she's never once gone to the Literature Festival at a weekend.
She goes on a Tuesday morning, when the gardens are half empty and the marquees smell of wet canvas and coffee and you can still get a seat at the good talks an hour before they start. I thought that was fussiness for about a year. It isn't. It's the single most useful thing anybody has told me about living here.
The other thing she told me took longer to sink in. Most of the Festival is free, and almost nobody realises.
That's the sort of thing this book is made of.
Who this is for
- People who grew up here, or left and still think about it
- Anyone who moved here from London or Bristol and is still working the town out
- Festival visitors who want the week from a local angle rather than a programme
- People thinking about moving, who want an area guide that doesn't pretend everywhere is Montpellier
What you get
- A full-length illustrated book, written as a story rather than a listings page
- October from the inside: ten days of the Festival, the free half, and why the weekdays are the local secret
- Race week handled properly, including how to have a good day without a badge
- The Regency bits worth stopping for, and the ones that are only famous
- Leckhampton, the Devil's Chimney and Cleeve Hill, with the timing that makes them worth it
- The chippy argument, argued properly
- An honest area-by-area chapter for movers
- Free updates for life
From Chapter Five
You can spend an entire afternoon in Montpellier Gardens in the second week of October and not spend anything at all, and it will still be one of the better afternoons of your year.
What this isn't
Not a tourist listings guide and not an estate agent's brochure. The town has parts that never see a penny of festival money, and the book says so.
Instant download. Read it on a phone, a tablet or printed out. If it's not what you hoped for, email us and we'll refund you, no argument.