Southbourne, one and a half miles south-west of Christchurch, will
soon become a mere outer suburb of Bournemouth. It almost touches
Boscombe, that eastern extension of the great town that has sprung
into being within the last fifty years. Southbourne is said to be
bracing; it is certainly a great contrast to the bustle and glitter of
its great neighbour. There is a kind of snobbishness that strikes to
decry any large or popular resort, seemingly because it _is_ large and
popular, but surely there must be some virtue in these huge watering
places that attract so many year after year, and if Southbourne
pleases only Tom, and Bournemouth Dick and Harry _and_ their friends,
well, good health to them! That their favourite town does not start
off a new chapter may offend the latter, but they will perhaps admit
that although it is on the west side of the Avon the town among the
pines forms, with its sandy chines and the trees that gave it its
first claim to popular favour, an extension and outlier of the great
series of heath and woodland that has just been traversed and that it
makes a fitting geographical termination to south-western Hants.

Though the pines themselves have not been planted much longer than a
hundred years, they now appear as the only relics of a lonely and
rather bare tract of uncultivable desert. Local historians claim that
the beginnings of Bournemouth were made in 1810, but it would appear
that only two or three houses existed by the lonely wastes of sand in
the first few years of the Victorian era. One of these was an adjunct
to a decoy pond for wild fowl. The parish itself was not formed until
1894, and although fashionable streets and fine churches and a
super-excellent "Winter-garden" had been erected when the writer first
saw the town, not much more than twenty years ago, the front was
extremely "raw" and the only shelter during a shower was a large tent