Millennium Plaza

These rather funky, urban looking apartments have just been built on the corner of Portland Street and Albion Street, right on the Inner Ring Road. To my mind its not the best place to live in Cheltenham but I bet there are good views from the balconies and more so the Penthouse. One of the apartments in this development is rented out as an hotel room, which is very odd in a residential building. Well it is round here. This new build sits on the sit of a former restaurant that was doomed from the start. The Millennium Restaurant was a space-age themed diner, and the building stood out like a sore thumb. It was built at the end of the 90's and it had a huge roof that was pitched like a birds wings in mid flight. I wish I had a picture to show you! The place only lasted a couple of years and sat empty for much of the start of the new millennium before being demolished last year. I don't think Regency Cheltenham was quite ready for the New Millennium!

Chim-Chimney

All these chimney pots sit on the roofs of the old back-to-back houses that are on one side of the Portland Street car park. The large car park used to have these sort of houses all over it but they were all demolished in the late 60's. One house escaped the compulsory purchase order (giving the right to developers to buy land, and whatever is on it, and then being able to knock it down) and stood alone in the vast sea of tarmac, until it was eventually demolished in 1980. A public toilet now stands on the site of the former number 14.

I don't imagine that many of the houses with these chimneys have open fires now-a-days, but in the past the smoke must have been billowing. Was that the start of global warming? Its all Mary Poppins' fault!

Holy Trinity

Holy Trinity Church, on Portland Street, is one of many buildings in Cheltenham designed by George Underwood. The Church was built in 1820-3 in a Gothic Revival style and is unlike many of the other Churches in town that have the usual spire, I think it has a French look about it. The construction of the church was funded by the sale of shares. Each share that a parishioner purchased entitled them to the use of a pew in the church. If you weren't well off enough to buy a share you had to pay a shilling to attend each service!