MALVERN in 1901 was described as "the personification of what may be styled middle-class affluence, leavened by considerable artistic taste".

This tribute was penned by a visitor to the town in the Manchester City News and was reproduced by the Malvern News.

The author described Malvern as a comparatively new town, built on the attraction of the 'water cure' which had by this time waned. Other towns were doing it better, he said.

"Little is heard nowadays of the medicinal value of the local waters, although the drinking water is said to be the purest in the country.

"But the knowledge of the tonic and recuperating qualities of the air has attracted more visitors than residents in the older days when hydropathy reigned supreme.

"And the chief landowners, two ladies who died within the last few years, would not allow the place to be spoiled by being made the haunt of the cheap day tripper," he wrote.

Even on a Sunday morning in January he found the dining room of his Malvern hotel crowded with visitors, many of them more or less permanent winter guests.

A fellow guest, an elderly gentleman who had lived in Manchester, told him the life was "an ideal one for widows, maiden ladies and ladies of a certain age, who have annuities or have been left settled incomes. They can live in luxury here in the finest air and most beautiful scenery, and dress well on £3 a week, and you will see that most of the season visitors at Malvern, as elsewhere, are ladies".

The author was struck by Malvern as a town of gardens.

There were eight or nine thousand inhabitants scattered over a thin line of terraces, perhaps five miles in length, and each with its own grounds.

But the glory of Malvern was the hills.

"There are no notices about trespassers, or keeping off the grass. This sense of freedom, of roaming where you will, is a pleasant feature of the six little towns or hamlets which constitute Malvern," he wrote.