City Rows
Text: Chester City CouncilTHE ORIGINS AND DEVELOPMENT OF CHESTER'S ROWS
WHAT ARE THE ROWS? Chester's Rows are unique. Although there are rows in other medieval English towns and cities, the term is applied to groups of buildings along street frontages. In Chester, the Rows are a system of walkways that form continuous covered galleries running above shops at street level. They occur in all four main streets in the city centre, so there are shops at two levels. Although the Row buildings have been re-built and altered over many centuries, they represent a building form that originated in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. However, the local conditions that influenced the development of the Rows, can be traced back to the legacy of the Roman occupation of Chester.
THE ROMAN CONNECTION Chester was founded as the legionary fortress of Deva, and the lay-out and subsequent development of the city was heavily influenced by the grid pattern of the original Roman street plan. Three of the main streets, Eastgate Street, Watergate Street and Bridge Street, correspond to Roman streets, although the streets of the fortress were broader and straighter than their present-day equivilants. Only Northgate Street bares little relationship to the Roman plan, for it crosses the site of Roman buildings, joining Eastgate Street at the site of the principia or legionary headquarters building.
Just as the street pattern survived, many of the Roman buildings also continued into the Middle Ages. It is their gradual collapse which is so important to the early development of the Rows. The level of the main streets in Roman times was much the same as today, very close to the natural bedrock which is near to the surface in Chester. However, as the Roman buildings gradually collapsed, debris built up behind the main streets, so that in some cases the land behind was nearly a storey higher than street level. When Chester's medieval merchants came to construct cellars or undercrofts beneath their town houses, they were forced to build on top of the bedrock, almost at street level. However, the debris slopes behind their houses, meant that while the front of these properties could be as much as 2m above street level, the rear corresponded with ground level.
EARLY DEVELOPMENT Archaeological and architectural evidence demonstrates that the Rows developed between the mid-13th and mid-14th centuries. This was a time when Chester was a prospering city with a well-established pattern of settlement and long-standing property divisions. Much of the area within the walls would still be open space, devoted to gardens, orchards and even vineyards. The houses would be clustered along the main streets, perhaps with an almost continuous frontage.
There are three key events in the history of Chester during this period that seem to have directly contributed to the development of the Rows.
1. A terrible fire in May 1278, which is said to have destroyed large parts of the city, resulting in extensive rebuilding. However, archaeological excavations have so far found no evidence for this fire and there is no real evidence that re-building was deliberately 'planned' to include a Row system.
2. Edward I's Charter of 1300, which granted the citizens and their elected body (the Assembly) rights which included control over the vacant plots within the town. Chester's merchants constructed the buildings containing Rows and later controlled their use and development through the Assembly.
3. Edward I's use of Chester as his base for military campaigns against North Wales in 1277 and 1282, when hundreds of masons, carpenters and labourers employed to build the Welsh castles had their winter billet in Chester. Chester was at the height of its prosperity; wealthy merchants embarked on a building boom and some of the most highly skilled craftesmen in the country were on hand to build their new houses. For about 50 years, Chester must have been at the forefront of architectural fashion, pioneering new building styles.
The first documentary references to Rows, relate to the area around St. Peter's Church in the commercial heart of the city. By the 1290s, the area on the east side of Northgate Street was known as Ironmonger's Row and houses with undercrofts are recorded. These early Row buildings probably had an elevated gallery, but were not yet part of a continuous system. Access to Row level would have been by many different flights of steps. However, during the 14th century galleries were gradually linked to form continous walkways, possibly through the co-operation of adjacent property owners who needed to make their premises more accessible.
ADAPTATION AND EVOLUTION By about 1350 the Row system seems to have been largely in place. The frontages along the four main streets were lined with galleries, while stallboards on the street side of the walkway maximised the commercial potential of each building. A typical large hall in the Row, like that at......
Chester's years of prosperity effectively ended with the Black Death of 13.. and was followed by two centuries of economic stagnation when very little new building took place. The Rows survived virtually untouched, protected as a public highway. However, owners of Row properties were vigilant to preserve and improve their commercial viability.
From the late 15th century onwards, householders enlarged their properties by extending the chamber over the Row and supporting it on posts in the street. The gap between these posts and the street side of the Row walkway was then covered thus extending the stallboard. The undercroft or street level shop could then also be extended, often by adding a shop front reaching as far out into the street as the stallboard above it. This process called encroachment, continued through the 16th and 17th centuries. Sometimes a small shop or chamber was built on the stallboard, so that the Rows became exceptionally dark, dank and even dangerous places. Encroachment was carefully controlled by the City Assembly, and owners had to pay a fine and annual rent, because by extending their properties forward into the street, they were effectively taking land from the city.
Under the Tudors, Chester's fortunes began to revive once more and the late 16th and early 17th centuries witnessed a building boom in the city. Large new houses like Stanley Palace were built in their own grounds, and Row buildings were adapted to meet the changing fashions of the period. Medieval open halls were subdivided into chambers and large chimneys repaced the open hearth. People no longer wanted to live at Row level, and lavishly decorated new chambers, like that in Bishop Lloyd's Palace, were created above the noise and bustle of the Row walkway. Tudor House in Lower Bridge Street is the best surviving example of a new Row building of this period.
THE LOST ROWS During the Civil War, Chester suffered a disasterous siege from November 1644 until February 1646, when it was starved into surrender. The city was very badly damaged and the economy was in tatters. Rebuilding took many years, continuing well into the 1660s. Timber was still the favoured material, although brick was now in use in other parts of Cheshire. However, towards the end of the 17th century, Chester's prosperity revived and the city became a fashionable social centre. Landed families began to rebuild their old town houses in the latest classical styles. Wherever possible they sought to get rid of the Row, which was both architecturally unfashionable and an intrusion on their privacy. During the late 17th century and 18th centuries, significant sections of the ancient Rows system was lost through enclosure or rebuilding.
The earliest recorded enclosure of a Row was during the Civil War in 1643, when Sir Richard Grosvenor petitioned the Assembly to enclose the Row of his town house in Lower Bridge Street (now the Falcon), in order to enlarge the building. As a leading Royalist commander, garrisoned at Chester Castle, his request was granted and the Row walkway was enclosed to form a new room in the front of the house. The stone columns which once supported the upper floor and the original shop front at Row level, can still be seen in the Falcon bar.
The grant to Richard Grosvenor set a precident which was to lead to the loss of almost all the Rows in Lower Bridge Street. Because of the turmoil of Civil War, it was not until 1668 that the next permission to enclose was sought and granted. Once a section of Row has been lost, householders were able to claim that it was now useless as a public walkway. In 1676, Lady Mary Calvely petitioned to enclose a Row so that she could build an entirely new mansion - Bridge House (now Oddfellows Hall) was envisaged to be "a grace and ornament to the city". In 1699, the lawyer John Mather also gained permission to build a major new house, resulting in the loss of the Row at 51 Lower Bridge Street. Not all proerty owners had the wealth to completely rebuild, many simply refronted their houses, absorbing the Row as an additional room. The Row of Tudor House, enclosed by Roger Ormes in 1728, still survives within the building.
The Rows of Lower Bridge Street were sacrificed to architectural fashion because they had become predominantly domestic rather than commercial. Elsewhere, in the heart of the city, the Rows were still thriving places of trade and the Assembly excerted control by refusing permissions to enclose. Sir George Booth who rebuilt two medieval houses in Watergate Street in 1700, was obliged to keep the Row walkway, ingeniously creating the best classical mansion in the Rows. However, Row enclosure can be traced in all four main streets, with the sections of Row furthest from the commercial heart of the city generally being lost.
VICTORIAN ROWS In the second half of the 19th century, Chester was transformed by the half-timber or vernacular revival, a major rebuilding of the city centre which was characterised by a desire to capture the spririt of formaer times. The Rows, which had been so unpopular and unfashionable in the 18th century, were acclained as "quaint", "unique" and "picturesque". They were also becoming a lucrative tourist attraction.
Led by talented local architects including Thomas Mainwaring Penson, Thomas Meakin Lockwood and John Douglas, many ancient buildings were heavily 'restored' or completely rebuilt in the black and white 'Tudor' style which has come to epitimise Chester. In all but one very significant case, the Rows were respected and improved. The exception was Shoemakers' Row on the west side of Northgate Street, which was gradually redeveloped at the end of the 19th century. All medieval fabric was removed and the elevated Row walkway was replaced by a street level arcade.