From a small market town to its heyday as a fashionable watering place and recognition as ‘the most complete Regency town in Britain’, through to its subsequent reinvention as a centre for religion, education, shopping and festivals, Cheltenham has a proud and distinctive identity. This extraordinary history is embodied in the buildings that have shaped the town, from the medieval church (now its Minster) and the Montpellier Rotunda, where a young Gustav Holst performed, to the world’s first (outside of London) purpose-built Masonic hall and one of the country’s most iconic buildings of the modern era, the GCHQ Doughnut.

In this unique study well-known local author David Elder guides the reader on a tour of its greatest treasures, revealing that Cheltenham’s history is sometimes complex but never dull.