Lying on a lounger, watching the early morning rays dance hazily on the calm turquoise sea, I couldn’t believe how warm the autumn sun felt on my skin. The rain had been coming in sideways when I’d left London, and just a few hours later, after navigating a couple of final hairpin roads, I’d checked into my home for the night – a hillside, pitched-roof villa with a perfect vantage over the golden beach below – and had barely seen a cloud in the sky since.
No, I hadn’t caught a quick flight to the Italian Riviera; I was less than 100 miles from home on the south-east coast of the Isle of Wight, in the town of Ventnor, which boasts a mild microclimate that usually makes it a few degrees warmer than the mainland. The isle as a whole gets more hours of sun than anywhere else in the UK.
Ventnor’s seafront also has a distinctly Mediterranean look, with palm trees dotting the cliff and a colourful Cascade Garden tumbling down towards the bay below. It’s also home to several Italianate buildings, including my hotel,
