‘All towns have a history’ began Roey. Which if it isn’t the motto of the Historic Towns Trust, really should be. Her talk however took us well before the work of the Trust to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, considering what constitutes a historic town today and at various points in the past. It is the process by which certain towns became known as ‘historic’ during the nineteenth century that Roey is especially interested in, and these insights were shared with us during the evening.

A vice we all permit ourselves as local historians is to talk too much about our own neighbourhoods. So too did Roey’s talk begin with her own city of Leicester. She noted its fame as the resting place of King Richard III. Leicester has recently been subject to a marketing drive to encourage nostalgia and a sense of place, laying claim to its place in our national heritage. In many ways the promotion of modern historic towns echo ideas that came to be when the concept of the ‘historic town’ was first invented.

Of course, Leicester and every other historic town is subject to so much accretion over time that deciding what heritage to curate and promote is a complex and ever-changing process. This practice stretches unknowingly on into the future, but we can trace it back in time. To Roey’s mind the period 1780-1840 is when the value of the historic fabric of towns was first articulated and efforts to deliberately record and preserve this began.

While much of the architecture of modern British towns dates from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there was a significant period of change before this. This transformation drove an understanding of what a historic town was as contemporaries began to recognise certain towns as ‘historic’ in light of the changes in the urban environment.

The ‘great and the good’ towns of the early modern period had mostly gone into relative economic decline during the eighteenth century. Infrastructure stagnated and the guildhalls, city walls and castles which dominated these urban spaces looked increasingly outdated. In many of these towns there also remained strong medieval civic traditions and pageantry such as in York, Winchester and Oxford.

This was all at a time when the population was growing rapidly and with it the demand for civic infrastructure, such as gas mains and sewers. Change was especially driven by the voices of commerce who advocated for wider streets. Many older features were cleared away and there simultaneously developed an urban culture which itself called for new buildings like assembly rooms, town halls, libraries and hotels. The demolition required for building projects was however a form of archaeology which revealed the past and sparked an interest. There also arose a sense of loss and grief over the disappearance of the familiar and a growing feeling by inhabitants that they had inherited their towns from their predecessors. Local identity became bound up with landmark buildings which were increasingly felt to be part of the historic record, bearing witness to past, present and future.

Beyond local situations, Roey pointed us to wider trends influencing people’s thinking. Firstly, was the explosion of print culture as it became cheaper and better illustrated. Expanding print culture enabled people to consume the past more readily than ever before. Printed history and especially histories of everyday life boomed. Interest also shifted to national from ancient history as had previously been the fashion. These histories tied into a Whiggish narrative that had taken hold that Britain was a growing power, striving toward modernity from a historic past. We can add to this heady mix the influence of Romanticism which called for a personal attachment to the past. It was an era of historical novels such as by Walter Scott and William Harrison Ainsworth. There was also a new trend for illustrated guidebooks of English towns which were rolling off the presses by the 1840s.

The visual was particularly influential in this process. Foreshadowing the work of the Historic Towns Trust many nineteenth century maps aimed to depict the lost historic landscape of towns. For example, Seyer’s map of Bristol and Woodward’s of Norwich.

It was however images of walls which particularly drove interest in historic towns. Many English towns had lost their walls during the seventeenth century through destruction during the civil wars or dismantling afterwards. Though this process was slower in the north of England where continuing fear of Scottish invasion kept the impetus to retain them. In most towns however, walls were built into houses or pulled down with the stone repurposed. By the late eighteenth century walls were increasingly becoming a problem. Not only were they expensive to maintain to prevent them from becoming a danger but there was always temptation by the public to actively remove stones. Walls also restricted the expansion of the city and penned in the population by encouraging them to live within the walls. Combined with rapid population growth many walled towns were becoming overcrowded and unsanitary. A new and pressing problem was the increase in horse and carriage road traffic which old gates could not accommodate. The ensuing trend to dismantle gateways and walls in late eighteenth century was therefore seen as a positive sign of modernity.

As walls lost their function, became a financial and physical burden and were finally removed, a sense of loss developed. Uselessness allowed them to be romanticised. People developed a sense that walls gave their town a distinctive character. In keeping with the archaeological discoveries resulting from other rebuilding an interest also developed in how walls had been built, and who had built them. So emerged campaigns firstly to record and then to preserve historic walls.

It is here we return to images. There are notably no depictions of York’s walls or bars before nineteenth century before a sudden upsurge in interest. We have significant examples for Bristol from this time in the Braikenridge Collection, who funded artistic representations of the walls. Here Roey acknowledged Braikenridge’s involvement in trade which benefitted from slave labour. An aspect of Britain’s heritage we must be alert to. Skelton and O’Neil’s Etchings of the Antiquities of Bristol is noted as a particularly fine example of wall illustrations.

The romantic experience was important for viewers and visitors of walls. With these images you could imagine yourself as Charles I surveying his army at Chester or as a Roman centurion. This combined with a culture that emphasised order and stability, epitomised in Edmund Burke’s constitutional arguments of saving what we have inherited from the past. Preserving walls became the physical equivalent of preserving traditions.

Depicting walls in turn spurred further interest and discussion with a flowering of topographical literature. Altogether this stimulated debate on what should be preserved (and what shouldn’t) with the first serious discussion in Britain on ownership of national heritage. From this point developed early campaigns to preserve historic secular buildings.

The examples of Chester and York illustrate this trend. Chester has the best-preserved walls in England (Conwy’s in Wales are better). This is partly due to a tax on linen that was levied into the modern era to maintain them. They were also turned into a public walk giving them a continuing function. With the growing fashion for guidebooks and tourism Chester was well-placed as a stop for those who made their way to the major port at Liverpool and to the scenery of Wales. In time Chester itself became known for its walls and roads with its own guidebooks. It was deliberately branded as somewhere you could step back into the past, away from the everyday of the nineteenth century.

York’s walls in contrast had fallen into disrepair. Corporation members were selling bits of masonry from them, allowing building against, and overcrowding within them. They seem to have been deliberately left to fall to strengthen the case for their removal. Eventually, a petition to have them removed completely was brought forward. The response was a national campaign to save them. From the 1820s was a shift to seeing York’s walls as an asset in need of preservation. Measures to raise money in publications drew on the language of public and civic good. They were reimagined from being gothic relics of barbarism to bastions of antiquity and civilisation. As with Chester they became part of the identity of the city, and excellent branding for tourists.

Slowly (but far from surely) historic towns had become historic curiosities, ‘national remains’ of value to the nation and to local people. Pieces of the historic fabric of our towns and cities were therefore protected as attitudes changed. Emotional attachment and the economic value of tourism had combined to invent the historic town. We are all appreciative of the legacy that has been left for us to inherit.

Further resources:

The publications of the Historic Towns Trust can be purchased from all good retailers and are listed on their website: Welcome to the Historic Towns Trust and the British Historic Towns Atlas | Historic Towns Atlas

The Braikenridge Collection: Bristol City Council: Museum Collections

Henry Cave, Antiquities of York (1807): Antiquities of York

Oliver Creighton and Robert Higham, Medieval Town Walls.  An Archaeology and Social History of Urban Defence (2005)

Rosemary Sweet, Antiquaries: the Discovery of the Past in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2004)

Rosemary Sweet, ‘The preservation of Crosby Hall, 1830-50’, Historical Journal, 60:3 (2017), 687-719.

Rosemary Sweet, ‘Antiquarian transformations in historical scholarship: the history of domesticity from Joseph Strutt to Thomas Wright’, in Perry Gauci and Elaine Chalus (eds.), Revisiting the Polite and Commercial People: Essays in Georgian Politics, Society and Culture in Honour of Professor Paul Langford (Oxford, 2019).

Peter Borsay, with Rosemary Sweet, The Invention of the English Landscape c. 1700-1939 (forthcoming Bloomsbury, 2023)

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