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Renowned for its clean sandy beaches, the resort of Bournemouth is the nucleus of Europe's largest non-industrial conurbation stretching between Lymington and Poole harbour. The resort has a single-minded holiday-making atmosphere. The city dates only from 1811, when a local squire, Louis Tregonwell, built a summer house on the wild, unpopulated heathland that once occupied this stretch of coast, and planted the first of the pine trees that now characterize the area. Sadly, the blandly modern town that you see today has little to remind you of Bournemouth's Victorian heyday, though it does boast some exuberant horticultural displays, and exploring Bournemouth's public gardens can easily fill a day. Moreover, the pristine sandy beach ranks as one of southern England's cleanest, while the town possesses a first-rate indoor attraction in its Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum on East Cliff Promenade (Tues-Sun 10am-5pm; free), which houses a motley assortment of artworks and oriental souvenirs gathered from around the world by the Russell-Cotes family, hoteliers who grew wealthy during Bournemouth's late-Victorian tourist boom. The benefactors' lavishly decorated former home, featuring unusual stained glass and ornate painted ceilings, is jam-packed with their eclectic collections, of which the Japanese artefacts are especially interesting. There are some good examples of Pre-Raphaelite and other British art downstairs, period decor throughout and a cliff-top landscaped garden. In the centre of town, you might visit the graveyard of St Peter's church, just east of the Square, where Mary Shelley, author of the Gothic horror tale Frankenstein , is buried, together with the heart belonging to her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, former resident of Boscombe. The tombs of Mary's parents - radical thinker William Godwin and early feminist Mary Wollstonecraft - are also here.
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