Lymington

Sea Baths, High Street and Quay

Lymington Sea Water Baths has been letting people swim in the Solent, more or less, since 1833, which makes it the oldest open-air seawater lido in the country. The building is a solemn Georgian thing funded by shares to the tune of £6,000, and there was a bathing house on the spot even earlier — a Mrs Beeston ran "strengthening sea baths" here from 1772. It now contains a 150-metre floating obstacle course, water zorbs, and aqua-jousting, open roughly July to September, weather permitting. The dignity and the water zorbs coexist without apparent friction.

The lido sits at the bottom of things, down on the water. Lymington is a Georgian market town on the west bank of the Lymington River, on the edge of the Solent and the southern boundary of the New Forest, and its shape is simple: a wide cobbled High Street runs downhill from the tower of St Thomas' Church to the Town Quay, with three marinas and a busy yachting harbour below and a belt of salt marsh stretching south along the coast toward Hurst Spit. Quay Hill, the steep cobbled alley linking the High Street to the water, is now full of restaurants and tearooms. It used to be the route down which tons of salt were carried each day to the boats.

The pubs cluster where you'd expect them, near the water. The King's Head is tucked just off the Quay end of the High Street, one of the oldest inns in the New Forest at around 300 years, with old-fashioned furnishings, an open log fire, and a sunny courtyard garden. It is Cask Marque approved and keeps London Pride, Ringwood Best, Timothy Taylor's Landlord, Young's and HSB. The Ship Inn stands right on the Town Quay, and its main attraction, beyond the real ales, is that you can sit in the garden and watch the Isle of Wight ferry come and go. The Mayflower, also near the water, has a summer garden with views over the Solent and a local reputation for the best Sunday roasts in the area. All three welcome dogs.

Pubs, Dining and Family Cafés

Out of the centre, the Chequers Inn sits at Lower Woodside near the salt marshes. It dates to the 16th century and was historically linked to the salt-workers' trade, and it serves local sausages, honey-roast ham, scampi and a vegetable tart. The Fisherman's Rest, down by the harbour, leans on fresh local seafood and an ever-changing specials board. On the western edge of town, at 17 Milford Road, the White Hart is a Grade II listed gastro-pub with bar snugs, a children's menu, and — for the dogs that ran out of patience at the other pubs — a dedicated dog menu, so they "don't feel left out too."

For a town of sixteen thousand, the eating punches high. The Elderflower, on cobbled Quay Street, is run by Andrew and Marjolaine Du Bourg, who took it over in 2014; Andrew was head chef at Chewton Glen and at Michelin-starred Club Gascon in London before this. The format is a surprise tasting menu — you aren't told what you've eaten until the end of the meal — running to four, five or seven courses. Past dishes have included heather-smoked grouse with New Forest honey glaze, sea urchin velouté, and a dessert called "Forest Floor," a chocolate tree log with blackberry parfait and hazelnut ice cream that one reviewer called "a culinary masterpiece." Up on the High Street, inside the Georgian Stanwell House hotel, Samphire is a seafood restaurant led since early 2024 by Matthew Tomkinson, who earned a Michelin star at the Montagu Arms in Beaulieu. The fish comes straight from the local boats, which still land at the Town Quay.

The cafés are mostly family affairs. Lemana Coffee & Kitchen, tucked down a passageway at 24B High Street, opened in 2010 when a woman named Rachel had the idea and brought in her parents and siblings; her relative Laura makes the carrot cake it's known for. The Larder, in a courtyard called Earl's Court, is run by Karl and Esther-Kate Cheshire and does Spanish tapas on Thursdays and Fridays. Lounges, at 122 High Street, has been going about ten years and does crab sandwiches and full English breakfasts, and is happy to have your dog. And at 3 Gosport Street there is the 777 Motorcycle Café, which shares its premises with a working motorbike garage and MOT bay, run by a proprietor who goes by Rafe Seven. You can, in principle, have a coffee while your bike gets its test.

Bakehouse, Charter Market and Marshes

The bakery is worth a paragraph on its own, because Hoxton Bakehouse was born here. In February 2014, two former chefs, Florence Hellier and Darren Bland, put an oven, a single table and a small fridge on a credit card and started a bakery at 40 High Street. It now has branches across Hampshire and supplies sourdough and pastries to more than sixty hotels and restaurants, including Lime Wood and Chewton Glen. It still bakes on the High Street every morning. For wine, the Solent Cellar on St Thomas Street occupies a building that dates to the 17th century and is run by Simon and Heather — Heather trained as a chef at Ballymaloe in Ireland before the wine trade — and the shop turns up, lightly fictionalised, in Helen McGinn's novel Just One Day. A mile out on an industrial estate, the Brew Forest is a nano-brewery and taproom run by a brother-and-sister team, David and Helen, with food trucks on Fridays.

All of this is busiest on a Saturday, when the Charter Market runs the full length of the High Street from eight until four — over a hundred stalls of plants, produce, clothing, crafts and bric-a-brac, laid out on the cobblestones between the Quay and the church. The market has run since the town's medieval charter of 1250. The High Street was deliberately built wide to hold it, which it still does, most of a millennium later.

The walking starts on the water. From the mouth of the Lymington River, the Solent Way runs flat along the sea wall to Keyhaven — about 5.3 miles, an hour and a half or so — through the Lymington and Keyhaven Marshes, which are former salterns, the old salt-pan lagoons now given over to birds. In winter the mudflats fill with wigeon, redshank and curlew. Keep going and you reach Hurst Spit and Hurst Castle, Henry VIII's artillery fort of 1541. It is easy, level ground, exposed to the weather and prone to mud after rain, so waterproof boots earn their place. North of the town, on the edge of the Forest, Buckland Rings is a triple-banked Iron Age hillfort; a three-week dig in 1935 under Christopher Hawkes turned up a small iron chain, some pottery, and not much else, and concluded it was built before the Romans arrived. A gentler classic is the four-mile Boldre and Roydon Woods circuit through farmland and ancient woodland, crossing the Lymington River twice, with the Red Lion at Boldre for refreshment at the far end.

Forest Links and the Salt Trade

The open Forest is close. Brockenhurst, five miles up the A337 or ten minutes on the branch-line train, has ponies grazing off the road; the same branch line, single track from Lymington Town and Lymington Pier, connects to the main London Waterloo line at Brockenhurst about every half hour. From Lymington Pier the Wightlink car ferry crosses to Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight in about forty minutes. Beaulieu and its motor museum are six miles by the B3054, and Buckler's Hard, the 18th-century shipbuilding village on the Beaulieu River, is eight. Families with a wet afternoon to fill have Woodside Park, twenty acres with a skatepark and the Woodside Fairy Trail, a downloadable map for hunting the "Fey of Woodside" — gnomes, goblins, faeries, elves and brownies — and the St Barbe Museum just off the High Street.

The town's fortune was salt, for about seven hundred years. Seawater was evaporated in pans along the coast and boiled in copper vessels, and at its height, in the early 1800s, the marshes produced around 4,000 tons a year. Daniel Defoe, passing through in the 1720s, found the place "chiefly noted for making fine salt, which is indeed excellent good; and from whence all these south parts of England are supply'd." Then rock salt was discovered in Cheshire, undercut everything, and the last salt works closed in 1865. The maze of creeks that made the salt also made the town a landing place for smugglers — brandy and silks especially — with the Isle of Wight sitting just across the narrow water. And the riverbanks that once built fishing boats and naval vessels now hold marinas: the schooner Alarm, built here by Thomas Inman, raced the American yacht America in the 1851 America's Cup, and yachting has been the river's business ever since. Up to a hundred boats race off the town every Thursday evening in summer.

From Lentune to the Landing Boats

The Domesday surveyors recorded the place as Lentune, held by one Leving under Edward the Confessor. When William annexed its woodland to the new royal Forest, the assessment was halved and the value fell from twenty shillings to fifteen — the New Forest making itself felt in the accounts within twenty years of the Conquest. St Thomas' Church crowns the top of the High Street; its tower went up around 1670 under a Georgian cupola, and inside there are three galleries, a scattering of wall monuments, and a relief figure of a woman that Pevsner, not a man given to enthusiasm, called "exquisite." Coventry Patmore, the poet, spent his last five years here in near-seclusion and died in the town in 1896. Admiral Arthur Phillip, who sailed the First Fleet to Australia and became the first Governor of New South Wales, rented a house on the corner of Ashley Lane from 1798 to 1803. And there is a gold post box on the High Street, painted to honour Sir Ben Ainslie, the four-time Olympic sailing champion and a member of the Royal Lymington Yacht Club.

The town keeps the fish going out and coming back in. The boats still land at the Town Quay, and their catch travels a few hundred yards up the hill to end up on Matthew Tomkinson's plates at Samphire — the shortest supply chain a fish is likely to get, and about the only one of the old trades the Cheshire mines never managed to kill.