Where to Stay in Basingstoke, England

What is Basingstoke known for?

What the town actually holds is Basing House at Old Basing, the Willis Museum in the middle of the streets and the Milestones Living History Museum, a set that survived the decades when Basingstoke was written off as a dull place with nothing for a visitor. The Domesday Book already knew it as a market town. No settlement in Hampshire is larger without city status.

The River Loddon rises here.

What are the main landmarks in Basingstoke?

Basing House anchors everything. Its ruins at Old Basing, with the Church of St Mary, Old Basing beside them, hold more of the past than the rebuilt centre does, and the Willis Museum and the Milestones Living History Museum take on the job of explaining it. Older fabric survives in the Church of the Holy Ghost, the Chapel of the Holy Trinity, St Michael's Church, Basingstoke and the Church of St Andrew.

After that come the houses. Worting House, Daneshill House, Golding House, Winton House and Chute House carry names from the parishes, and May's Bounty keeps its own.

What is the history of Basingstoke?

The town is older than its reputation. The Domesday Book already records it, and for centuries afterwards Basingstoke worked as a market town for this part of Hampshire, with Basing House at Old Basing as the great house of the surrounding country and parish churches, the Church of the Holy Ghost, St Michael's Church, Basingstoke, the Church of St Mary, Old Basing, the Church of St Andrew, marking the settlements that fed it. Winchester, the county town and a former capital, lies 20 miles south-west.

Chineham, Worting and Cliddesden were farming ground. Then came the new town. In the nineteen-fifties Basingstoke was picked as one of several places built up to take overspill from London, and the scale of that rebuilding is what produced both the modern street plan and the roundabouts the town has never lived down.

For two decades afterwards it carried a joke reputation, dismissed as dull, offered to visitors as somewhere with little beyond trainspotting and traffic islands, and the claim that no town in the United Kingdom has more roundabouts for its size is still repeated more often than it is checked. The borough of Basingstoke and Deane now carries the name outward. The Willis Museum keeps the long version.

Where is Basingstoke?

A valley carries the town. Basingstoke lies across it at the source of the River Loddon, on the western edge of the North Downs, and the rest of Hampshire reads outward from that point in plain distances. Reading is 22 miles north and Guildford 27 miles east.

London lies 48 miles north-east, Southampton 30 miles south-west and Winchester 20 miles south-west, which leaves the town inland of the coast and short of the capital by a comfortable margin. Old Basing, Chineham, Worting and Cliddesden ring the built ground.

What is the climate of Basingstoke?

Nothing here sharpens the weather. Basingstoke sits in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, and its setting does little to complicate that: the valley at the source of the River Loddon is inland ground, the sea off Southampton is 30 miles away, and the western edge of the North Downs is hill country rather than mountain. Seasons turn without extremes.

Old Basing and Chineham get the same weather as the centre, so the calendar matters more to a visit than the choice of quarter.

How do you get to Basingstoke?

Roundabouts meet every arrival. London lies 48 miles north-east, Reading 22 miles north, Guildford 27 miles east, Southampton 30 miles south-west and Winchester 20 miles south-west, which puts Basingstoke within an easy run of all five and makes it a common stop rather than a destination. Chineham and Old Basing are minutes out.

The traffic pattern that earned the town its joke also makes driving in straightforward once it is read.