Take stock of Stockbridge

Above: Stockbridge still has its own High Street duck pond. Photograph by Jean Brooks

Above: Grosvenor Hotel

Above: A lovely place to live

Above: Looking east along the High Street, this photo is taken from the former railway bridge, circa 1900

Above: Looking west along the High Street. The town hall seen in this photograph was built in 1790, and is now due for renovation

Above: Stokes Garage is now a Listed building

Above: Stokes Garage

Stockbridge is unique,” says the waitress serving morning coffee in the town’s Grosvenor Hotel. “This is the sort of place where a lorry driving down the High Street will shudder to a halt to let a family of ducks across.”
Of the latter there are many, particularly at this time year, because Stockbridge still has its own High Street duck pond. Sitting pretty as it does in the heart of the valley of the River Test, with numerous streams feeding into it, this means not only a multiplicity of cute little footbridges everywhere, but also lots of accommodation for our feathered friends … and other fishing types.

Indeed, anglers make pilgrimages from all over the world to fish the River Test and its tributaries for its abundance of large stocked brown and rainbow trout, which are reeled in at anything from two to six pounds and more. With pressure on the river today immense, a typical day’s rod costs between £80 and £250 – and don’t even think of trying to join the local fishing club, the Houghton, because it’s so exclusive not even royalty can get a look in (see panel).

Famous visitors
For a little town of barely more than 500 people, Stockbridge has more than its fair share of visiting celebrities who have included, most recently, Margaret Thatcher and her guest and keen angler, George Bush senior and his wife, complete with entourage of men in dark sunglasses and suits, much to the amusement of the other guests staying in the nearby Lainston Hotel. 

Not all of the celebrities are just visiting either, comedian Jim Davidson has recently bought a home in the village and there are rumours that US heart-throb actor Johnny Depp has also acquired a property there and that celebrated chef Gordon Ramsay is to turn what used to be Stokes’ Garage into the latest outpost of his empire (although Gordon Ramsay Holdings denies this). 

Excellent eateries
Not that Stockbridge is short of excellent places to eat mind you, as it already has the Greyhound, which until recently could boast its own Michelin star, an oriental restaurant with a pretty outside garden, an Indian restaurant and takeaway and, looking like something out of a Harry Potter story, the picturesque 15th century Three Cups Inn, which specialises in – perhaps unsurprisingly given its location – fish dishes. In fact, with the fishing now in full spate, locally-caught trout is also currently on the menu of the Grosvenor Hotel, along with whole silver bream and John Dory fillet.
Another famous eatery here is bakery and tearoom, Lillie, whose traditional liver and bacon casseroles and bread and butter puddings, and the lovely aromas wafting from its baking bread and croissants, call out to the hungry in the High Street. Its namesake, the actress Lille Langtry, also proved something of a pull in her day to the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. The couple used to stay as guests in two Stockbridge houses whose gardens were connected by one of those famous little footbridges, so they could be together to watch the horseracing that once took place nearby.

Renowned retail
Small Stockbridge may be – in fact, some people have even questioned whether it deserves the right to be accorded the status of a town at all – but it is also perfectly formed, with its own bank, post office, busy lizzie-bedecked police station, fire station and more shops than you could shake a stick at. The fame of two shops in particular  – the butchers John Robinson and Stockbridge Racing, which makes harnesses for racing cars – reaches beyond the county, even beyond these shores. Stockbridge even has its own town hall. Built in 1790 and now earmarked for renovation, today it is used for a variety of purposes, not least as the place where Gloria and Nancy sell their alpaca wool jumpers from Peru on Tuesdays and Fridays, and where artist and dealer Steve Gatt offers a wide range of original paintings for sale at reasonable prices over one weekend every month.
This goes some way to show how popular the town is, not only with the rich and famous, but also with those who may be just passing through from nearby Salisbury and Winchester. Visitors who stop for a bite to eat are seduced into taking a lingering look round.
For villagers like Tony Collingswood, however, who finally moved there four years ago after a 30-year association with the town: “It is just a lovely place to live.”

Wild drovers
Some 200 years ago, the sight of large herds of cattle or sheep being driven through the town to be either fattened on the pastures of Hampshire or Sussex, or to be sold in Smithfield Market in London, was not uncommon in Stockbridge.
Many of the herds, which could stretch for up to three or four miles, were also likely to have been destined for the ships leaving Portsmouth or Southampton.
Drover’s House, in Houghton Road, is a reminder of this trade. Its walls carry in Old Welsh the message: “Seasoned Hay, Rich Grass, Good Ale, Sound Sleep” – all that drovers on the move with their animals could ask for.
Droving declined with the coming of the railways and disappeared altogether when cattle lorries appeared in
the 1920s.

The Houghton Fishing Club
The Houghton Fishing Club is one of the most exclusive clubs in the world – in fact, so much so that it is said locally that not even Prince Charles, a keen angler who is known to have enjoyed fishing along the banks of the River Test near Stockbridge, has the clout or megabucks to be invited to join.
This only happens rarely anyway, since the club has no more than 30 members and, in order to stop its waters being overfished, it will admit no more. Possibly the oldest dry-fly fishing club in the world, it has fishing diaries that have been kept since it was founded in 1822, as a ‘fellowship of anglers dedicated to the pursuit of trout with the fly’ (apparently the fellowship part is as important to members as the fishing).
The club now owns some 14 to 15 miles of fishing along the Test and its many feeder streams, as well as the town’s Grosvenor Hotel, where members meet in the curved room over the entrance portico to eat, drink and talk about the ones that got away.