Milk Street, West Quarter

Milk Street is typical of dozens of medieval roads and alleys that used to criss-cross the old city of Exeter i.e. it's ancient in origin but nothing survives today earlier than the 1950s. Like many of Exeter's medieval streets, the street adopted the name synonymous with the trades of the people who lived there e.g. Goldsmith Street, Preston Street, Smythen Street. Milk Street was simply the street where people bought and sold milk.

The image left is from the Hedgeland model of Exeter as it appeared in 1769. The buildings which either fronted onto Milk Street or which formed part of it are highlighted in red. Fore Street runs from left to right at the bottom of the photograph. The far end of Milk Street was a junction where it was possible to turn either left or right into Guinea Street. When Hedgeland constructed his model between 1817 and 1824 Milk Street, like much of Exeter at the time, was predominantly a city of timber-framed buildings from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. According to Hoskins, Milk Street has been in existence since at least the 12th century, being first recorded during the reign of Henry II. Until 1942 it was a narrow lane leading from Fore Street down to Guinea Street. From the 1830s, most of the right-hand side was dominated by the towering wall of Charles Fowler's neo-Classical Lower Market.

The street map right shows Milk Street, George Street, Guinea Street and the Lower Market in 1905. The buildings highlighted in red no longer exist i.e. nearly all of them. The area was comprehensively bombed on 4 May 1942. The Lower Market was gutted by fire and much of Milk Street, George Street and Guinea Street were reduced to rubble and ash. The obelisk survived the bombing relatively intact but was later demolished.

Before the construction of the Lower Market it was possible to access the medieval shops known as Butchers' Row right via Milk Street. It was so narrow it was sometimes necessary to remove joints of meat hanging in the shops to allow horses to turn the corner into Smythen Street. On the left side, before arriving in Guinea Street was a small square, with George Street, another very narrow and ancient lane, leading off it. In this square a water conduit was placed when the Lower Market was first built, having been moved from outside the 14th century Hall of the Vicars Choral in South Street. A stone obelisk marked the site of the conduit to which many people living in the cramped West Quarter would come to collect fresh water.

The line of the street itself could possibly even have been Roman in origin. The forum, the Roman city's main marketplace c200AD, is believed to have been located between Milk Street and South Street. Aileen Fox, who excavated the bombed areas of the city after World War Two, speculated that Milk Street might be a shadow of the Roman road which led from the forum to the South Gate.

Hoskins mentions that numerous previously-concealed medieval buildings in Exeter were exposed by the destruction of 1942. He writes that "one of these was a fourteenth-century building in Milk Street". Here the bombs had revealed a garderobe (a medieval shaft that functioned as a toilet) embedded within the wall of a bomb-damaged property. The remains of the house were demolished during the post-war clear-up.

Today the street barely exists. In the post-war rebuilding the line of Milk Street was reduced to a small passageway under the mediocre architecture that flourished in Exeter during the 1950s and 1960s and all traces of earlier buildings were removed. The photograph above left shows the post-war entrance into the remnant of Milk Street. The photograph below shows the view from the opposite direction, the entrance into Guinea Street on the left. It goes without saying that now there is absolutely nothing of any visual or historic interest to be seen. The small passageway leads through to the post-war market building and today the entire area is remarkably grim.

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The Lower Market, Fore Street

The Lower Market above c1920 was one of two exceptional neo-Classical market buildings constructed in Exeter in the 1830s. The other was the Higher Market in Queen Street. In 1833 the city authorities decided to gather Exeter's many street markets into two separate market halls. The Lower Market, or Western Market, was the first of the two to be completed and was designed to cater primarily for the city's butchers (formerly located at Butchers' Row in Smythen Street since the end of the 15th century). A room was allocated above the main entrance to function as a Corn Exchange. The Higher Market was used for poultry, fish and vegetables.

The Lower Market was designed by Charles Fowler, born in Cullompton in 1792 and already the renowned architect of the former vegetable market at Covent Garden in London. Work began in 1835 on a site at the top of Fore Street, extending back from Fore Street itself to truncate Smythen Street as it ascended towards South Street and demolishing the medieval Butchers' Row which stood within the footprint of the new market building.

The photograph right shows the huge colonnaded hall of the Lower Market prior to 1942. The high clerestory windows, arched arcades, aisles and barrel ceiling, supported on pillars of granite, were reminiscent of a Roman basilica. During the excavations for the Lower Market's foundations, a Roman medal was unearthed. In a truly remarkable coincidence, on one side of the medal was the head of the Emperor Nero and on the other was a depiction of a building not dissimilar to the Lower Market itself. The Roman medal had itself been struck to commemorate the construction of a meat market in Rome 1700 years earlier. This discovery inspired the Exeter Corporation to issue their own medal to memorialise the creation of the Lower Market. Fashioned out of bronze, one side of the medal featured the facade of the Lower Market and on the reverse were the three-towered emblem of Exeter.

The image left shows the Lower Market on a street plan of 1904 overlaid onto an aerial photograph of the post-war city. The market is highlighted in red. The area shown was comprehensively bombed in 1942 but the market building could've been salvaged and the ruins stood for many years after the war. The market building was bounded by Milk Street to the east, Guinea Street to the south, Market Street to the west and Fore Street to the north. The Fore Street frontage was much narrower than the full width of the building. The market was finally completed in 1836 and opened for business on 9 December the same year. During the building of the Lower Market the public water conduit in South Street was relocated to a little square in Milk Street where it was marked by the construction of a stone obelisk. The square was actually created by the demolition of buildings on the corner of Milk Street and George Street.

It was a colossal building of which the city at the time appears to have been justly proud. There were two entrances, one through the main facade in Guinea Street and one through the narrower facade that faced onto Fore Street. The magnificent Guinea Street facade (shown at the top of this post) consisted of a row of high arches flanked at the ends by two partially rusticated large towers surmounted by low pyramidal roofs. A neo-classical pediment marked the full height of the hall inside.

In the words of Professor A. E. Richardson, who wrote about the Lower Market in an edition of 'The Architectural Review' in 1920, the Guinea Street elevation showed "the fine scale of the building, the refinement of the ornament, the originality of the conception, and the correctness of expression, for it is unmistakeably a market and nothing else." Over the Fore Street entrance Charles Fowler had incised his own name. Italian composition and Greek detail merged to create "a building both monumental and useful".

The narrower facade in Fore Street right was supported on four rusticated square columns, topped by sculpted bulls' heads and wreaths, above which were three arched windows which gave light into the first floor Corn Exchange. Above these were a series of smaller arched windows, the whole being crowned with a neo-Classical pediment, the tympanum dominated by a large representation of the coat of arms of Exeter.

The Lower Market remained in use until 4 May 1942 when it was gutted by fire following the bombing of the city during World War Two. The roof and the interior were totally destroyed but most of the external walls remained standing. The local historian, W. G. Hoskins, wrote that the Lower Market "stood in its ruin after 1942 like a piece of ancient Rome: indeed one could imagine oneself among the ruined public buildings of the fifth century in Exeter". As with Bedford Circus, the Lower Market could've been reconstructed had the local authority been willing to do so.

The photograph right © Express & Echo dates to 1953, eleven years after the Exeter Blitz. It shows reconstruction work in South Street going on in the foreground and in the background, highlighted in red, are the considerable remains of the Lower Market. In fact the ruined shell of the building stood until 1960. Structurally, the remains of the gutted exterior were sound but, along with almost every other city centre building damaged in the 1942 air-raid, the Lower Market was comprehensively demolished. Its huge granite blocks were torn down and thrown into the river to help shore up a riverbank.

Even more extraordinary then was the dismal building which eventually arose almost on the same footprint of the Lower Market itself in 1960: St George's Hall and Market, a large function room with an accompanying market. Like all of the post-war reconstruction, the resulting building was a total break with the historical pre-war character of Exeter. Even the city council's own conservation area report states that the buildings are "undistinguished and make no attempt to fit into the context of historic Fore Street". It was designed by the city council's own in-house architect H. B. Rowe and is described by Pevsner and Cherry as "a rather tatty effort in a belated Festival of Britain spirit". Unfortunately there's nothing remotely festive about it. It's one of the post-war buildings in Exeter which I particularly dislike. As with a number of other post-war eyesores in the city, trees have been planted outside to try and disguise it. St George's Hall and market remained as a market until several years ago when it was 'rebranded' as The Corn Exchange, although any comparison with the great Corn Exchange buildings at Leeds or Bristol will be short-lived once you see the feeble and inappropriate structure which sits now on the site of the Lower Market.

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The Chevalier Inn: Nos. 78 & 79, Fore Street

These two magnificent timber-framed merchant houses were built in the early decades of the 17th century and stood for over three centuries at the top of Fore Street. The house on the left, No. 78, was the older of the two, dating to around the 1610. No. 79 dated to c1640.

Both were distinguished by the exceptionally elaborate projecting oriel windows that jettied out over the pavement of Fore Street, the frames being supported on carved oak corbels. The only similar windows that survived into the late 19th century in Exeter were at Nos. 19 and 20 in North Street, demolished c1890.

The name by which the two houses were known in the early 20th century originated from a terracotta ridge tile in the shape of a knight on horseback that stood on the gable end of No. 79, peering down into the street below (just visible in the photo below). These roof finials were once fairly common across the city in the 16th and 17th centuries but the one on the Chevalier inn was the last to survive in situ, said to mark the site of a house that lodged cavalier soldiers during the English Civil War.

In 1829 No. 78 was purchased by John Trehane, a Justice of the Peace, and the Trehane family owned it until it was sold in 1889 to Charles Ham, a wine and spirits merchant. In 1879 No. 79 was a pharmacy run by a Mr Thompson and was later a wallpaper and paint shop and a bookshop. By 1942 the two properties functioned together as the Chevalier inn.

The interiors were as impressive as the exteriors as both houses had rooms of panelling, decorative plaster work ceilings and stone fireplaces. (More information on the plaster work ceilings that once existed at No. 79 Fore Street can be found here.) An 1879 tourist guide to the city recorded that "many of the interiors are peculiarly rich in walnut wainscot and shields of arms and will well repay a visit from the antiquarian and archaeologist". An article in Trewman's 'Exeter Flying Post' dating to 1899 stated that "such a rare piece of antiquity will absorb for a while the whole attention of the onlooker", describing the two properties as "among the glories" of Fore Street. It's hard to argue with the assessment.

Until the 18th century at least, No. 79 appears to have stood on the corner of Fore Street and a now long-vanished lane which led into George Street. The lane appears on Benjamin Donn's 1765 map of Exeter in about the right place. The Fountain inn, probably named after the nearby water conduit, stood nearby. Further evidence for the existence of this lane appears on a drawing of what I believe is No. 79 Fore Street.

The drawing left appeared in an 1848 edition of the 'Gentleman's Magazine and Historical Chronicle' but had actually been executed some years previously. It was only titled 'Elizabethan House at Exeter'. In appearance it is almost identical to surviving photographs of No. 79 High Street. The major differences are the arrangement of the door and windows on the ground floor and the absence of the little terracotta figure of the knight on horseback. The great oriel windows on the first and second floors are exactly the same. If it is No. 79 High Street then it suggests that the property was originally built as a corner house. The lane visible to the right is shown on a map of 1832 but had disappeared by the 1860s.

Anyway, these superlative houses were two of Exeter's most well-known landmarks. Both properties were threatened with demolition in 1929 but a campaign by numerous organisations and individuals resulted in them being saved, purchased by the City Council with help from a £10,000 government loan. Just 13 years later in the early hours of 4 May 1942, both houses, the finest timber-framed buildings left in the city, were incinerated by German firebombs.

No trace of the buildings survive today, not even the little terracotta figure of the knight on horseback, and now the area is one of the ugliest, most visually unappealing in the whole city. In the book 'Aspects of Exeter', Jacqueline Warren recounts a legend attached to the terracotta figure. It was claimed that every March the figure would leave the top of the gable and gallop to the Cathedral where it ascended one of the towers, looking out over the city towards the fields of St Leonard's in remembrance of the time during the English Civil War when the Royalists were holed up in the city and General Fairfax's Parliamentarian army was camped to the south.

Drag the handle on the image below to see before and after pictures: