The area surrounding Bournemouth has been the site of human settlement for thousands of years. In 1800 the area was largely a remote and barren heathland. No-one lived at Bourne Mouth and the only regular visitors were a few fishermen, turf cutters and gangs of smugglers who landed their cargoes of spirits, tea and tobacco on the deserted beach.

The area had once been a hunting estate 'Stourfield Chase' but by the late 18th century only a small part of this was maintained. These parts comprised several fields around the Bourne Stream including a cottage known as Decoy Pond House, which stood near where The Square is today.

In 1809 a new building the Tapps Arms public house appeared on the heath. In 1812 the first residents retired army officer Lewis Tregonwell and his wife moved into their new home built on land he had purchased from Sir George Ivison Tapps.

First Tregonwell and later Tapps began developing the settlement for the holiday lettings. They planted pine trees, providing a sheltered walk to the beach. The town was to grow up around its scattered pines. Twenty-five years after the Tregonwells started work on their holiday mansion, Bournemouth was still only a small community with a scattering of houses and cottages.

In 1835 after the death of Sir George Ivison Tapps, his son Sir George William Tapps-Gervis inherited his fathers estate and started developing the seaside village into a resort similar to those that had already grown up along the south coast such as Weymouth and Brighton.

By 1841 there were still only a few hundred people living in Bournemouth but that was soon to change. In that year the seaside village had an important visitor, a physician called Augustus Bozzi Granville. He was the author of a book called 'The Spas of England' which described health resorts around the country. As a result of his visit, Dr Granville included a chapter on Bournemouth in the second edition of his book. It was this more than anything that put the town on the map as the perfect place for people with health problems, especially chest complaints which were far more common in the 19th century than today. Bournemouth quickly became a destination for affluent holiday-makers and for invalids in search of the sea air. In the 1840s the fields south of the road crossing (later The Square) were drained and laid out with shrubberies and walks.

In 1856, Parliament approved the Bournemouth Improvement Act. Under the Act, a board of 13 Commissioners was established to organise all the things involved in the running of a small but growing town, such as paving, sewers, drainage, street lighting and street cleaning.

By the 1860s the fields to the north were also laid out with walks by the owners of the Branksome Estate. In the early 1870s all the fields were leased to the Bournemouth Commissioners, by the freeholders. These fields now form The Pleasure Gardens, which run through the centre of the town; although the former name of The Lower Pleasure Gardens is no longer officially applied to the area south of The Square. The area continued to progress with the development of the railways and the popular idea of visiting the seaside for holidays. Among the people who contributed to the development of Bournemouth at this time were Sir Percy Shelley (son of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley) and Sir Merton Russell-Cotes.

In 1880, the town had a population of 17,000 people. By 1900 this had risen to 60,000, and by 1990 it had more than doubled again, reaching 150,000. In the latest census, the town had a population of 163,441. Since the 1990s there have been increasing calls for the town, together with Poole, to attain official city status (as per the example of Brighton & Hove) due to its sheer expanse and regional importance.

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the Wikipedia: Bournemouth page