This Side of the Pond

Even now, I continue to stumble across unexpected links between my nation and yours – some of them more direct than others. My most recent discovery is about as personal as it gets, because it involves the specific area of my home town where I spent most of the weekends of my youth.

I speak of Poole Quay, one the bustling center point of the town’s maritime industry but now a popular recreation site for tourists and locals alike. Today, it’s lined with pubs and cafes, the Sunseeker luxury yacht factory, redeveloped warehouses and ultra-modern apartment blocks, side by side with historic listed buildings and the best fish and chip stand on the planet.

Hundreds of years of history made Poole Quay what it is today: my favorite destination for an evening out. I’ve lived in charming places since I left home, but the quay will always hold my heart.

I hold a particular fondness for the architecture of the older buildings – and it’s in those buildings, once home to rich local merchants, that I discovered this new link. Perhaps the most famous is Beech Hurst, a red-brick-and-white-window façade with classical columns that was built in 1798 by Samuel Rolles, a local businessman.

The place of my birth has been inhabited for at least 2500 years (probably longer, but Britain has been plodding along for such a long time that we’ve clear forgotten where we started) and was one of the landing sites for the Romans, but its history as a town began in the seventh century, and it all had to do with fishing.

I’m sure we had spectacular fish markets – you can’t go three feet without tripping over a cockle at Sandbanks, even now – but we were pretty small and unimportant until one of the civil wars began (we’ve had eight of them in England, if I’m counting correctly). This one was called The Anarchy and, in 1139, rival and neighbor town Wareham burned down, after which a lot of its merchants fled up the coast to the more defensible location of the Poole peninsula.

Poole took another step forward in 1433, when we were granted “Port of the Staple” status. This allowed us to begin exporting wool, which was a great way to make cash back in the days before lycra and nylon, even though I feel sorry for anyone who had to struggle along under the weight of a wool coat while it was raining.

A couple of centuries later, Queen Elizabeth I granted us the Great Charter, making us sort of independent from the county of Dorset. We became, somewhat confusingly, “the County of the Town of Poole”, which is about as inside out as you can get.

It’s at this point our story really gets going. This was the time of the North American colonies, when the Europeans who landed on strange new shores discovered the waters around them were quite literally teeming with fish.

The merchants of Poole were quick to take advantage of this fact and established successful commerce across the Atlantic that was to last for several centuries. By the middle of the 1500s, we were lugging huge quantities of salt across to the colonies and bringing back salted cod, which was in turn brought back to Europe and traded with Spain, Portugal and Italy, which gave us wine, olive oil, dried fruits and even more salt with which to start the cycle again.

By the early eighteenth century, my home town had more ships trading with North America than any other English port, which meant its merchants were getting wealthier by the shipload. Their legendary prosperity launched the development of Old Town, replacing the medieval buildings by the quay with extravagant new houses.

Beech Hurst, for example, was built with the fortune made by Rolles’ uncle, Samuel White, one of the seven family firms that controlled the trade between Poole and North America. White was an infamous miser for whom the term “careful with his money” was a gross understatement.

It’s said that White would cut a piece from a side of bacon in the kitchen and lock it away before he left the house. When he came home, he would check the piece fit back in place to be sure that nobody had had the audacity to feel snackish.

Napoleon is to blame for quite a lot of things, and one of them is the end of that golden era. The peace following the Napoleonic Wars meant France and America could also fish the waters, taking over the services our merchants had long provided.

Fortunately, the industrial revolution arrived soon after, which helped the town grow even more, but even that had a negative effect in the end. Poole might boast the second largest natural harbor in the world, but it’s also relatively shallow – the ever-bigger ships of the industrial age were too large to use the port.

Which is why, today, you’ll find very little cargo being unloaded at Poole Quay, but a whole lot of families enjoying an ice cream. And close enough to Old Town that the buildings could reach out and shake hands, you’ll find the quay’s newest lucrative export: the Sunseekers.

You’ll have seen these luxury yachts in many a movie and music video. They are iconic enough that a Sunseeker is on the wishlist of every celebrity and lottery winner alongside the inevitable private jet.

North America is one of the biggest markets for the Sunseekers built on Poole Quay, which means the old link is still very much in place. It’s thanks to this side of the ocean that I had such a special place to spend my youth – and it’s also thanks to North America that it’s still going strong today.