St. George's

St. George's began with a shipwreck. In 1609 the Sea Venture, carrying settlers to Jamestown under Admiral Sir George Somers and Sir Thomas Gates, was driven onto the reefs in a storm. The survivors built two new ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, and most sailed on to Virginia, leaving a few men behind to hold the islands. In 1612 more settlers arrived aboard the Plough, and the town was begun on the north side of St. George's Harbour. The town was first called New London.

From 1615 the Somers Isles Company ran Bermuda from here until it was dissolved in 1686. The State House was built in 1620 for the House of Assembly, and St. Peter's Church, consecrated in 1612, was rebuilt, its oldest surviving parts dating from 1620. As the islands' only true port, the town was tied to colonial America: thousands of Bermudians emigrated to Virginia and the American South. In August 1775 a group of Bermudians sympathetic to the Continental Congress stole gunpowder from the town's magazine, rolled it over the hill to Tobacco Bay and shipped it to the American rebels. During the American Civil War, St. George's was the base for blockade runners supplying the Confederacy.

The capital moved to Hamilton in 1815, and much of the old town survived. Excavations in King's Square have found the foundations of the governor's house of 1612. In 2000 the town and its surrounding forts were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site as the Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications.

The town lives with its past. In the summer season actors in period dress play town criers in King's Square and sentence volunteers to the stocks, the pillory and the ducking stool, and the Visitors' Service Bureau on the square runs walks through the old streets. Bermudians are particular about the town's name: in local usage it is always "St. George's", in the possessive, as with St. David's and many other Bermudian place names. Since 1996 the town has been twinned with Lyme Regis in Dorset, the birthplace of Sir George Somers.

St. Peter's Church has been in continuous use for worship for four centuries. The Bermuda Heritage Museum, in the lodge of a society founded to help formerly enslaved people after emancipation in 1834, tells the history of Black Bermudians, and the town's museums cover printing and the Confederate blockade runners.

Sport ties the town to the rest of Bermuda. The St. George's Colts football club plays at the Wellington Oval, which is also a cricket ground. Above all, St. George's is one half of Cup Match, the two-day cricket match between the Somerset and St. George's clubs played over the Emancipation Day and Mary Prince Day holidays in late July or early August.

St. George's Parish, which takes in the town, St. David's Island and the Tucker's Town area, had 5,659 residents in 2016, about 9 per cent of Bermuda's population. The town is the parish's centre, with its Town Hall on King's Square, a preschool and a primary school, churches, shops and the harbour.

The parish is joined to the rest of Bermuda by the Causeway, a chain of small islands linked by reclaimed land and bridges, and buses run from the town straight to Hamilton. Tourism shapes the rhythm of the day: in the summer season, cruise passengers and visitors from elsewhere on the islands fill the square and the beaches by day, and the town grows quiet in the evenings. Winters are much calmer.

The old town's status brings both care and limits. Historic buildings are looked after by bodies such as the Bermuda National Trust, which runs museums in the town, and the old lanes and buildings are part of the World Heritage Site.

The town has the largest concentration of restaurants on Bermuda after Hamilton, most of them pubs and restaurants on Water Street and around King's Square by the harbour. The White Horse, a pub on the square, and The Wharf, on Water Street, are among them.

Menus follow the Bermudian kitchen. Fish chowder, the national dish, comes dark with fish and beef stock and is finished at the table with black rum and sherry-pepper sauce. Codfish cakes are a staple, and the traditional Sunday breakfast is salt cod with potatoes, hard-boiled egg, onion and banana. Local wahoo and rockfish are common, and spiny lobster appears in season, from September to March. At Christmas many families make cassava pie, and peas and rice and hoppin' John are traditional dishes too.

The drinks are the islands' own: the Dark 'n' Stormy, black rum topped with ginger beer, and the rum swizzle, a rum punch, both closely associated with Bermuda and poured in the town's waterfront bars.