Lyme has managed to wed past and present without loss to either, so that we have a steep main street down which a plumed cavalier, a
hansom cab or a motor coach might follow one another without either of them looking at all as if they had strayed into the wrong century.
There is a magic about that Broad Street and the Cobb, about the queer little buildings that have strayed away and lost themselves in odd corners and
angles, that court daydreams of ‘King’ Monmouth and ransomed Wessex tars, home from Barbary, yet someone at sometime in the town’s development must
have said ‘Look, we are proud of our past but we are not going to be silly about it!’ which was all to the good, for there is nothing more tedious than an ancient
borough cashing-in on its ye-olde-worldliness.
Lyme has preserved an antiquity in a manner worthy of a district that nursed the ancestors of Winston Churchill, that sustained a siege on behalf of
Parliament and sent the Protestant Duke inland on his ill-fated rebellion, but, glory be, it has also kept abreast of the times and offers modern shops and
hotels, up-to-date sanitation and an intelligently progressive outlook. A word about the folk who live in Lyme. \
You will find them as typically English as their surroundings, pleasant, wholesome people with that sturdy independence that characterises the Westcountry man. They won’t be put upon but neither will they put upon you and if you take them as you find them you’ll make three thousand new friends over your holiday, as I did when some happy chance caused our unit to select Lyme Regis for the scene of an English film about English people.
