Bournemouth at Christmas – ok, it doesn’t compare with some of the big markets which is why you won’t see it in lists of “best Christmas markets in Europe 2022!!!” but it’s still good fun. It starts down on the pier and stretches all the way through the gardens and up to the Square.
So, on the pier, there’s a trail of trees tastefully lit in white and interspersed with Christmas trivia questions. The point of this is to lead you to the bar on the end. I wasn’t planning to drink – I don’t like the taste and also I had to drive home – but I wanted to investigate what’s going on on the pier. It’s a bit unnerving in the dark to hear the sea roaring away and if you peer between the trees it’s just a bit too far down for me to be entirely comfortable. The sea is a scary thing and heights are scary so I retreated to the land.
Back on land, you can’t miss the Observation Wheel, which has its carriages lit in different colours and there’s a giant Santa abseiling down the middle. The simulator, which has been there forever, has been rebranded as a The Snowman ride. I suppose the operators would get tired of it blasting Walking In the Air 24/7 for two months but when it’s playing Robbie Williams’ swing era, it does make me wonder if I’m understanding it correctly. Last, there’s a lit-up conical Christmas tree in the middle. Then you walk under the road and into the gardens and Christmas in Bournemouth really opens up.
Bournemouth is perhaps better for food than anything else. On the left are two food vans – churros and hot chocolate at the first and various meat things at the second. Opposite, on the terrace of the Pavilion is the Alpine bar, where you can have your own festive/Nordic pod to enjoy drinks in relative privacy. It’s all wooden benches and fleece blankets and cushions and it’s so pretty! It’s probably prettier from the inside than taken through the plastic but you get the message.
In the gardens themselves, there’s a trail of illuminated trees. Ok, many of the “trees” are no such thing – I did chuckle at signs attached to giant reindeer and boots and polar bears saying “please do not touch the trees”. My favourite is the rope lights streaming down the rockery – I don’t know if it’s actually a waterfall but the stream runs past the bottom so there’s the noise of running water to confuse people and I just really like that one. Obviously the trees are great too. You see some of the same suspects year after year – the one made of white spheres is an old friend and there’s always the tunnel tree. It’s huge and it’s made of millions of little lights, so it plays patterns and music and it has a tunnel through it so you can take your selfies in there. It’s usually very busy but I was there a little early in the season so there was room for photos.
After that, there’s the ice rink on the right. I did go skating but that’s getting its own post in a week or so. For now, I’ll just say that you book an hour-long session and there’s another Alpine bar attached.
Then you’re coming up to the Square. You do slightly take your life in your hands crossing the road because this is the central Bournemouth bus hub – the actual bus hub is up at the station but that’s 2km away, so the Square is where the buses all meet.
Into the market, the first thing you see is food again: roasted meats, a hot chocolate bar, German sausage, raclette, vegan sausages, churros etc. I’m not a huge fan of the smell of a hog roast but churros and hot chocolate smell good. At this bar, you pick the kind of hot chocolate you want – milk, white or dairy-free – and then you pick the flavour and then you add any extras. Any other day, I’d probably have gone for it, even if just for the sake of taking photos of it, but I was going ice skating and I knew that a mugful of hot chocolate sloshing around inside me wasn’t a great idea. I’ll have some in Germany in a proper ceramic Christmas market mug.
The market itself is a little disappointing, although admittedly that’s because I was oblivious to anything on my left or in front at first. There’s the usual wax-wrapped truckles of cheese, there’s olives & Turkish delight in more flavours that I’d realised they exist. I bought a bag of köhler küsse – if you haven’t come across these, they’re round-topped marshmallows coated in chocolate and they always collapse before you get them home. I bought a bag of one mint, one orange, one zebra-coated and one ordinary milk and had the sense to take them back to the car. They were going to get crushed beyond recognition if I tried taking them on the ice rink.
I was tempted by a “real Viking drinking horn” – that is, a horn taken from a cow in the 21st century – but they were expensive. The teeny-tiny 50ml ones were £10 and the ones big enough to actual taste when you’re drinking were too expensive for my tastes, especially as I’d probably only drink out of it once. They don’t stand up by themselves so I’d probably get tired of it pretty quickly. There’s the usual hats and scarves and cowls, there’s personalised Christmas decorations, there’s Moroccan-style glass mosaic lights (at least, the shop in Reykjavik selling them says Moroccan). Hiding around the corner is a stall selling something calling itself Moonshine.
Yeah, there’s enough to keep your interest for a while but I soon found myself straying back to the gardens. Hiding up on the ledge by the new aviaries is another little bar complex. This one is Picnic on the Piste and it’s decorated with skis and signposts and meant to look like it’s on the side of a ski slope. It was pretty quiet and the busker up on the little stage singing Oasis (not Wonderwall, thankfully!) had a very small audience.
So all in all, there are plenty of places to eat and drink and they’re all beautifully themed and look so festive and so cosy. I bet in December this is all really atmospheric and really busy and the trees are a great background to an evening of Germanic eating and drinking but for me, it was all about the trees and the ice skating. I love a light trail, I love an outdoor Christmas event and… well, I had feelings about the ice skating but that will come later.
