Postcard from Malvern

Malvern is a charming spa town in the West Midlands. It's famous for its water, its hills and its Elgar. It is a delightful place, actually comprised of a number of villages strung out along the hills, each with their own distinct personality, Great Malvern is posh - that's where the theatre and lovely wee independent coffee shops that sell cake are, Malvern Link is more commercial - that's where you find shops that sell things that are useful, instead of just pretty or conversation-stimulatingly ugly, and Malvern Wells is home to the bohemian set - artists and musicians drawn to the area's beauty who can essentially be characterised as men with long hair and women wearing too much eyeliner.

Malvern is also home to Quenitic, or however the hell you spell is. It used to be RSRE, where lots of toys for the armed forces were made. Then it was privatised and renamed, presumably by some marketing consultant who managed the twin feat of annoying everyone who thinks that 'kinetic' should be spelled kay eye en ee tee eye cee and causing the sort of person who froths with indignation at the thought of somebody being paid ten grand to mis-spell a word reach for their green ink. Having said that, if the brief was 'come up with an anonymous word that doesn't advertise what we do', then bravo! What they do is an open secret in Malvern, and given away because not many West Midland engineering firms have the latest armoured vehicles parked up in the car park, waiting to be tricked out with lots of things designed to put a crimp in your day if you live in a cave and think that letting off an RPG at a squaddie is the action of a fearless freedom fighter. Thanks to the boffins at Malvern, people like that often hear a 'woosh' noise shortly before they are redistributed across no fewer than five post codes.

It also means that there are a lot of rich people in Malvern, because it turns out that lots of people all over the world have enemies they would like to relocate over the landscape, and consider that while an armoured vehicle is all very well, an armoured vehicle bristling with enough offensive weaponry to let you safely queue barge at Asda in the run up to Christmas is just the ticket.

I have a mate who, on a fine summer evening, would walk on the hills, find a comfortable, secluded spot to recline and smoke some weed. He swore to me that one evening he saw a UFO. This was at the height of the popularity of the X-Files and so I put his seeing lights in the sky down to an over-stimulated imagination and plenty of Moroccan black rather than an alien visitation. More likely still is that they were testing some sort of aircraft, although whether bothering hippies was part of the design brief, I'm not sure.

As a spa town, Malvern has a curious, if delightful, atmosphere. It's like a landlocked seaside resort. There is a theatre, lots of grand houses and excellent rail links to London, a relic of the days when folk from the capital came up to the town to take the waters as part of the 'cure'. Now, of course, London has its own spas, although the water is shipped into the capital from all over the world at great cost. In Malvern, the water gushes free from the springs in the hills. The locals pitch up and fill containers with spring water. To anyone used to paying for their expensive bottled water in the shops, this is something of a revelation, like chardonnay bubbling up from the ground in a spring in Surrey.

And yes, the free stuff does taste better.


One of the rather lovely shops in Great Malvern is the fabulous Austin & Co. (austinandco.co.uk). This small shop sells the sorts of greeting cards, jotters and note books that you won't find in high street chains. I spoke with the proprietor about note books and he explained that he had weaned two of his customers off of Moleskien notebooks to a superior German brand that, when written in with a fountain pen, did not allow the ink to leak through the paper. Make that three customers now weaned off of Moleskien. The hand written sign advertising the notebooks announced that they were a recent arrival in the UK and were 'a must for any stationary fetishist'. I do so hate to be pigeon-holed, so accurately.

The hills themselves have many moods, changing minute by minute as the light changes. They can be shrouded by mists, bathed in sunlight, festooned with walkers. They can be black or bright green, or occasionally orange, when they catch fire.

The hills, and the spectacular views of Worcestershire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire that one has from them, means that the area attracts plenty of walkers. These come in all varieties but are universally underdressed if unaccompanied by a dog. There are backpackers, with maps, there are ramblers, with sticks, there are runners, with thighs of steel and there are those who see having to use a walking stick or a mobility scooter as no deterrent at all to strolling or rolling along the path to the peak to enjoy the view.

The locals love it to, throwing out the friendly greeting 'lovely view' got me the response 'aye, that's why we must protect it'. Whether the chap meant that a beautiful landscape looks better without a filthy great industrial development in the middle of it, or that his view would be better without the chatty bloke in an annoyingly bright anorak and his ridiculously happy dog tearing round in circles in it, I'm not sure.

As well as gentle paths and steep climbs, there are many places to stop and admire the view, with handy benches augmenting your ability to combine sitting and appreciating the view with the simple act of enjoying a refreshing cup of flask tea. Many of these benches have wee plaques explaining that they are in memory of this person or that person, who loved this view.


There's nothing quite like a practical memorial. My favourite is not a bench, hardly even a seat, but a sort of outdoor stool, perfectly positioned for the solitary contemplation of the Herefordshire countryside, a view of rolling countryside uninterrupted by large towns or shopping centres that most locals observe while giving silent thanks that they live in Worcestershire.