Nos. 5 & 7, West Street, West Quarter

Point the camera in the right direction and this little ensemble in West Street, with the lovely 15th century church of St Mary Steps as the centre-piece and the so-called House That Moved, is the single most evocative remaining fragment of Exeter's medieval past outside of the Cathedral Close.

 No. 5 and No. 7 West Street are only two of dozens of similar buildings which were unfortunately swept away between 1900 and 1935 during the city's mammoth slum clearance operations around Smythen Street, Stepcote Hill, Paul Street, Catherine Street, Preston Street, Coombe Street and Frog Street. No. 5 and No. 7 West Street were spared. No. 5 was built in the 15th century on the corner of West Street with Stepcote Hill and originally stood just inside the city's West Gate.

For centuries, every person who crossed the medieval Exe Bridge and passed under the West Gate would've seen this house as they climbed into Exeter via Stepcote Hill. According to Pevsner and Cherry, No. 5 comprised three quite separate units. There was a shop on the ground floor with another room behind. Above these were another two shops which were accessed via a still-existing passageway at the rear. The ground floor is constructed from the local Heavitree breccia. The second floor oversails the first floor on brackets. The side which faces into Stepcote Hill has two small, two-light cusped windows in oak. Apparently some original features remain internally and despite some significant restoration, which replaced much of the wooden timbering, it remains a very picturesque building.

No. 7 (to the right in the photograph top) is also allegedly from the 15th century. It too has a ground floor of Heavitree breccia but is built on four floors rather than three. The slightly larger proportions have allowed an extra floor to be squeezed into the cockloft where a small window peeps out from under the gable. No. 7 has been significantly restored with much replacement of old timber and the complete reconstruction in modern brick of the southern side wall.

The postcard view above shows the area around the houses c1900 before many of the surrounding timber-framed buildings were demolished. Nos. 5 and 7 are visible in the centre of the photograph, prior to their restoration and when the timber-framing was still covered in render (as it probably would've been when first built). Unfortunately the historical context of Nos. 5 and 7 has been almost completely destroyed, firstly by the slum clearances and then by road-building in the 1960s.

This entire area of Exeter escaped significant war-time bombing and had retained much of its pre-war character until the 1950s when the local authority decided to build the highly destructive inner bypass, known as Western Way, which tore through much of the city that had been left untouched by German bombs. The view shown in the photograph at the top of this post is a favourite for those wishing to promote the historic aspect of Exeter to tourists, but turn the camera in the other direction and the view is quite different as the medieval houses stand just metres away from a four-lane highway of fast-moving traffic.

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Frog Street, West Quarter

A number of cities, towns and villages across England had a 'Frog Street' or 'Frog Lane', including London, Sheffield, Trowbridge, Lichfield, Worcester, Bristol, Swansea, Minehead, Cannington and the nearby market town of Tiverton.

In many instances the streets were located close to water, either mill ponds, rivers or lake. The example in Tiverton is near the moat of the castle and the watery connection seems to appertain to the example in Exeter too as Frog Street was located very close the medieval bridge that once spanned the river Exe and surrounding marshes.

The watercolour of c1900, above left, shows the entrance into Frog Street from Edmund Street. At the end of the 19th century the street retained much of its medieval appearance and a remarkable number of timber-framed properties still existed from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

During the Middle Ages the marshy ground was gradually reclaimed and became known as Exe Island. As Hoskins says, "before that [Frog Street] was simply the swampy bank of the wider river Exe, frequented by frogs which gave their name to the new medieval street." Archaeological evidence proves that until the 1960s Frog Street had been continuously inhabited since at least the 13th century. One particularly large assemblage of medieval pottery discovered on the site of the tenements that once fronted onto Frog Street dates to c1230.

The illustration, right, is based on an 1851 drawing by George Townsend. It shows the view from inside Frog Street looking out towards Edmund Street. The house with the cockloft window in the roof, far left, is the same one visible to the left in the image at the top of this post and eventually became known as 'The House That Moved'. The four gabled houses almost certainly dated to the 1500s, their timber-framing hidden behind rendered facades. They were demolished c1870.

The postcard view below left, dating to the 1930s, shows that between 1900 and 1930 many of the timber-frame properties have been demolished, probably as a result of the slum clearance initiative that laid waste to medieval architecture in Stepcote Hill, Paul Street, Smythen Street and Preston Street. At least three remained in Frog Street though, the house on the left, (formerly 16 Edmund Street and later known as The House That Moved), the jettied three-storey house halfway down on the right, dating at least to the 1500s and another 16th century property out of view at the end of the street. In the early 1960s pressure from local archaeologists forced the City Council to relocate No. 16 Edmund Street when the decision was made by the Council to drive an inner bypass road through the city's old West Quarter. No. 16 was duly moved to its new position on West Street, unfortunately the other buildings weren't so fortunate.

No. 15 Frog Street, a two-storey timber-frame house from c1570 with an over-sailing upper floor was demolished and the rest of Frog Street was bulldozed out of existence, along with Edmund Street, most of West Street, most of Tudor Street, most of Coombe Street, and a huge swathe of 17th and 18th century properties at the entrance into South Street at Magdalen Street and Holloway Street, to name just a few of the affected areas; and this was after the huge demolition and redevelopment of the slum clearances of the 1930s and after the massive destruction and reconstruction of World War Two.

It is easy to understand why so little of Exeter's historic cityscape made it into the 21st century. Four waves of demolition washed over the city from 1900 to 1980 involving slum clearances, World War Two bombing, post-war rebuilding and post-war redevelopment in the 1960s and 1970s. The problem was that each of these phases affected different parts of the city. For example, the areas most affected by the slum clearances were also the areas which escaped the Blitz of 1942 largely unscathed. A more difficult question to answer is exactly how it was allowed to be lost in the first place as Exeter has been subjected to the sort of almost total clearance usually associated either with Haussmann's Paris, Ceausescu's Bucharest or with certain old towns which fell into Communist hands at the end of World War Two.

The map below shows a modern aerial view of Frog Street's former location overlaid onto which is a street map of 1905. It shows a tiny portion of the area which was demolished to build the inner bypass and the Exe Bridges road and river management system. The only surviving remnant of Frog Street today is the relocated house in West Street. Formerly No. 16 Edmund Street, its original location is highlighted in purple. Its present location is highlighted in yellow. The rest of Frog Street sits underneath a twin-lane carriageway. The section of the inner bypass which replaced the ancient street is still called Frog Street. What an insult to its medieval forerunner!!

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Preston Street Demolished

Like Smythen Street, Stepcote Hill, Paul Street, Goldsmith Street, Paris Street, Mary Arches Street, South Street, Sidwell Street, North Street, Guinea Street, Bear Street, John Street, Kalendarhay, George Street, Catherine Street, Pancras Street, Frog Street, Rack Street, Milk Street, Sun Street and much of the High Street, Preston Street is another of Exeter's medieval streets which today shows very few traces of its lengthy history.

Until the end of the 19th century, the old West Quarter was particularly rich in surviving timber-framed domestic houses from the late-Middle Ages to the 17th century, most notably in Coombe Street, Rack Street, Frog Street, Stepcote Hill, Smythen Street and Preston Street as well as in many small courts and alleys. Almost none of them have survive today, mostly the victim of slum clearances between c1880 and the 1930s. By the time the bombs fell in 1942 nearly all of them had already gone.

The West Quarter was a sprawling jumble of alleyways, courtyards, lanes and streets, full of inns, workshops and houses, the commercial and, to a large extent, residential heart of medieval Exeter. By the 1800s, following a process started in the 16th century, the wealthier citizens of Exeter had moved from the West Quarter up into the High Street and, in the late-18th century, to Bedford Circus, Southernhay and the suburbs beyond the city walls at St Leonard's and Pennsylvania. In the 19th century the West Quarter had become a slum comprising dozens of rotting tenements, many of which had been carved out of what were once the dwellings of some of Exeter's wealthiest medieval and Tudor citizens. The poor lived in the cast off houses of the rich.

The image right shows Preston Street as it appears on Caleb Hedgeland's wooden model of Exeter. The model was built between 1817 and 1824 but depicts the city as it was in 1769.

All of the houses which made up Preston Street are highlighted in red. Up until the mid 19th century most of the street consisted of timber-framed frontages dating from the 15th to the 17th centuries.

It was a narrow, straggling street, one of the longest in the medieval city, starting at its junction with West Street in the west and exiting into South Street. (Although included in the highlighted properties, the upper quarter of the street was known as Billiter Lane, later Sun Street, and was eventually regarded as a street in its own right. More information about Sun Street can be found here.) Even if there is no trace of its antiquity today, Preston Street is ancient, probably dating to the 9th century and the time of Alfred the Great.

The name of the street itself is self-explanatory being simply "the street of the priests". Hoskins cites the name as being as early as the reign of Henry II in the mid-to-late 12th century. He goes on to suggest that, because there were no parishes of the sort which are familiar today, the priests of Exeter's numerous churches and chapels congregated in one area, much like the blacksmiths did in Smythen Street and the milk sellers in Milk Street. This theory is borne out by George Oliver in his 'History of Exeter' in which he quotes a lease of 1296 which mentions Prustene-Street or Vicus Presbyterorum (literally, "the street of priests").

The image left, a detail from Hedgeland's model, shows the Grendon Almshouses on Preston Street, also known as the 'Ten Cells'. Founded c1404, they were demolished in 1878. By the late-13th century Exeter had acquired a network of parishes and the priests would've lived within each parish, but clearly the name had stuck. Over 800 years later it is still called Preston Street. It is continuity like this which makes living in a historic city so enjoyable, although unfortunately in Exeter the street names are frequently the only historic element of the townscape that still survive.

Preston Street fell within the huge ecclesiastical parish boundary of St Mary Major, and a number of interesting properties once stood on the street including the Grendon Almshouses, endowed by Simon Grendon at the beginning of the 15th century. The Dolphin inn was located on the corner of Preston Street with Market Street. The Dolphin was an ancient tavern once owned by the Earls of Devonshire and the Guild of the Merchant Adventurers. It dated to before the 16th century but, according to Dymond writing in 1880, it had been significantly rebuilt and was later destroyed in 1942. Another inn of great historical interest was the Mermaid, accessed from Preston Street. Dymond states that, as an inn, it was almost the equal of the New Inn on the High Street in terms of its importance. It was a sprawling, rambling building. Features inside included a large oak staircase with a carved handrail and a huge room, 56ft by 17ft, frequently used as an assembly room in the 19th century, which had an arched and moulded ceiling, "enriched with gold and colour", and a stone chimneypiece dated 1632, emblazoned with the arms of the Shapleigh and Slanning families. It had been completely demolished by 1880. The Mermaid inn was described T.J. Toce as "the house of Tudor days and personalities, down to recent times, and a noble and old building. The destruction and wrecking of its goodly timbers was a grievous loss to Exeter".

Further down, on the corner of Preston Street and King Street, was the so-called 'Norman House' right © Devon County Council. The building was spared during the slum clearances of the early 20th century and restored, although the exact history of the property remains unclear. It was damaged in 1942 and subsequently destroyed during the post-war reconstruction. It's a bitter truth that of the very small number of buildings on Preston Street which were affected during the Exeter Blitz one of them should've been the street's oldest and most historically significant surviving structure.

The photograph at the top of this post was taken c1900 looking down Preston Street from the junction with Rack Street. Apart from the fine pair of gabled house on the left, which possibly dated to the 16th century, of particular interest is the paved street with its central gutter. Everything shown in the photo, including the street surface, no longer survives. An even finer pair of houses from c1600 existed in the street prior to the slum clearances. They were built on four floors with pitched roofs and small windows set into the gable end (a wonderful photograph of them can be seen in Peter Thomas's book 'Exeter's West Quarter and Adjacent Areas')

A medical officer's report from 1865 stated that "In Preston Street I visited a house of six rooms, each let to a separate tenant. There were in all 11 adults and 20 children, the largest of these families being 2 adults and their 5 children, who thus had only one upstairs room for all their necessities". In 1866, during an epidemic of cholera, the residents of Preston Street were described as dying "like sheep". Another contemporary report stated that "the disease raged very severely in Preston-Street, where 17 of the deaths occurred, two or three in a day". Regarded as unsafe and unhealthy, much of the street was consequently cleared of its buildings between c1880 and the 1930s. The old timber-framed houses were demolished and the street itself was dug up and massively widened.

Fragments of historical interest did linger on into the 1970s. The Sawyers Arms was an inn which appeared to be two timber-framed houses from c1700. It was demolished in 1970s. No. 15 Preston Street left was another fragment. It was granted Grade II listed status in 1974. Dating to c1570, No. 15 was a small timber-framed house built on three floors with an oversailing top storey. It really was almost the last of its kind, not only in Preston Street but in the entire West Quarter. Only Nos. 5 & 7 West Street and the house formerly known as No. 16 Edmund Street now remain. No. 15 Preston Street was demolished without record by the city council soon after it had been listed.

The only buildings of any age which survive on Preston Street today are a small cul-de-sac of late-Victorian terrace houses called Grendon Buildings (built on the site of the almshouses which were demolished in 1878), a couple of red-brick late-19th century warehouses (one of which houses the Spacex art gallery) and a dull red-brick Victorian school. All the rest is either semi-detached, two-storey houses from the 1930s or post-war blocks of flats and modern terraces. As happened so often in Exeter, over the course of the 20th century nearly everything which remained of historical or architectural interest in Preston Street was simply obliterated. The street today, shown below, is sterile, utilitarian and drab, and it would fit in perfectly well in an outlying suburb in any city in England. To find it in one of Exeter's most historically important areas is depressing. Since the 1960s, instead of opening into West Street and the city wall, Preston Street now ends abruptly at the four-lane inner bypass.

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St Paul's Church, Paul Street

The fate of the medieval parish of St Paul provides an object lesson in how to destroy a centuries-old part of a historic city which had survived into the 20th century. A significant area of the parish, which contained many of Exeter's surviving timber-framed houses, was systematically demolished in the early decades of the 20th century. Much of the rest was pulled down in the 1970s for the construction of the Guildhall Shopping Centre.

St Paul's was one of the larger parishes in Exeter, and although the name of the church itself doesn't appear in records until 1222 it's likely that there was a church on this site since at least the time of the Conquest in 1066. Of particular interest was the fact that the St Paul to whom the church was dedicated appears to have been the Celtic saint St Pol, the 6th century bishop of Leon in Brittany, also called St Paul Aurelian, rather than St Paul the Apostle of Tarsus from the New Testament.

The map detail right shows the parish of St Paul in 1587, the church highlighted in red. The building is shown with a square tower surmounted by a short spire, or pyramidal roof, and with a cross, about halfway down Paul Street on the right at the junction of Paul Street with Goldsmith Street. The city wall is shown curving round towards Rougemont Castle to the left. As far as I know, this is the only existing depiction of the medieval church building. Three other parish churches are shown in the same image: St Pancras, St Kerrian and, at the bottom, the spire and tower of St Mary Arches.

Writing at the beginning of the 19th century, Jenkins states that this "ancient church was dark, mean and in a ruinous state". The medieval church was probably a 15th century version of a Norman building, itself a replacement of an even earlier Saxon structure. The dedication to St Paul in Paul Street was of such great antiquity that it's possible that the church was dedicated by St Paul Aurelian himself in the 6th century, a simple wooden building being the original church.

Anyway, that's all supposition. As Jenkins says, the medieval church was demolished at the end of the 17th century and a "handsome edifice, consisting of a nave and gallery" top © Devon County Council was built upon the same site. Work began on the replacement structure in 1680 and was completed with the construction of the tower in 1693. The finished church was the only Italianate parish church ever built in Exeter and was a startling contrast to the rough-stone red breccia 15th century parish churches which were once scattered throughout the city.

The late-17th century church is accurately depicted in Hedgeland's early 19th century wooden model of the city right, highlighted in red and still surrounded with the houses of its parish.

The church was built to a simple rectangular design, with entry via Goldsmith Street through an arched doorway under the western bell tower. Jenkins describes the tower as being "square and ornamented with a Dial, a handsome niche, and festoons of flowers; the Tower contains a clock and one bell, and on its summit is a small spire supporting a gilt weather-cock". The arches in the doorways was repeated in the high windows, the exterior walls rendered to leave only the quoins exposed at the corners. The single bell commemorated the restoration of the 'Templum Divi Pauli' in 1693 and had a coin of that year set into it.

According to Jenkins there was a small churchyard attached which was probably part of the footprint of the medieval church and which, in order to obtain the symmetry of its 17th century successor, was not used in the rebuilding of the 1680s. Beatrix Cresswell visited the church in 1908 and recorded seeing a "great many floor slabs and mural tablets" inside, the most impressive being the white marble monument "of angels, broken columns and decorations" dedicated to the memory Sir Edward Seaward, a former mayor of the city in 1691. There were dozens of other memorials with a massive black marble font standing under the tower.

As architecture it was not perhaps of enormous merit, but as visual evidence for historical continuity it was invaluable. The slum clearances in Paul Street in the first two decades of the 20th century saw many of the residents of the parish displaced to other areas. With most of its parishioners gone there was no need for the church itself and so the Bishop of Exeter ordered its total demolition in 1936. Hoskins described it as "a delightful little seventeenth century building that was wantonly destroyed".

The extraordinary photograph above © Devon County Council shows the demolition of medieval houses in Paul Street c1915, with the tower of St Paul's visible in the background on the other side of the road. The church was to suffer the same fate as the houses just 20 years later. For over 1000 years a church on this site had provided a focus for an entire community of parishioners, through the Norman Conquest, the Black Death, the Wars of the Roses, the Reformation, the English Civil War and Inter-regnum (during which the medieval church was purchased by its own parishioners), throughout the 18th century into the Industrial revolution, through the reigns of every monarch from William the Conqueror to George the Fifth in the 1930s.

The image above is based on St Paul's medieval parish boundary, which dated to 1222. It combines a modern aerial view of the parish with a street plan of Exeter from 1905. Only those buildings that existed within the parish boundary in 1905 have been highlighted. The properties highlighted in purple are the only ones still standing. All the areas in red have been demolished since 1905. The area cleared in the 1910s and 1920s, which contained the oldest and most historically important structures, is to the north-west of Paul Street, bounded on one side by the city wall. The buildings on the south side of Paul Street and those in Goldsmith Street were demolished in the mid-1960s for the construction of the Guildhall Shopping Centre. This was an area which remained entirely unaffected by bombing during the World War Two apart from some light damage in the north-eastern corner.

The site of St Paul's Church today is smothered by the vast and monstrous bulk of the 1970s' Guildhall Shopping Centre.

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The Slum Clearance of Paul Street

The early 20th century history of Paul Street is just a really sad story of the complete demolition of what was one of Exeter's largest surviving groups of medieval and post-medieval timber-framed houses. The photograph left © Devon County Council shows the north side of Paul Street c1910, looking down towards the Iron Bridge at the bottom of North Street, and still lined with houses from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries.

Archaeological excavations have shown that Paul Street lies on top of what was once the wall of the Roman fortress constructed over 1900 years ago, but the actual line of the street itself dates to the Saxon period and it takes its name from what was once St Paul's Church which stood on the corner of Paul Street and Goldsmith Street for a thousand years. (According to Hoskins, the name of Paul Street, or 'Poulestrete', has been in use since at least 1240.) Like much of the West Quarter, Paul Street had descended into slum conditions by the 20th century, with many families living in poverty within the rabbit warren of medieval lanes and courts which made up the entire area, places like Maddocks' Row, Rouse's Court, Lake's Cottages, St Paul's Place, Hodge's Buildings, Cornish's Court, Richmond Place and Barbican Place.

The illustration right © Devon County Council dating c1911 shows the interior of a room belonging to a house in Paul Street. The intricate, high status Jacobean decorative plaster ceiling dated from about 1625 and featured a complex geometric design outlined in raised moulded ribs known as strapwork. Both the ceiling, and the house it belonged to, were completely destroyed shortly after the drawing had been executed.

Before the creation of Queen Street in the early 1830s it was only possible to access Paul Street either from North Street, Goldsmith Street or from Gandy Street. When Queen Street was built it chopped through Paul Street as it ploughed on through the city wall, which is why the short passage running up the side of the Royal Albert Memorial Museum is today known as Upper Paul Street.

The photograph below left © Devon County Council shows a small courtyard surrounded by a group of properties known as Arthur's Buildings. It lay within the network of lanes behind the main elevations on Paul Street. Everything shown in the photograph had been demolished by the 1920s.

Also called Corry Lane, Paul Street was the site of one of Exeter's most intriguing historical buildings, known to 18th century antiquarians as King Athelstan's Palace (now demolished) which stood almost opposite St Paul's church (now demolished). Paul Street was also the location of the Pennington Bell foundry in the 17th century. The foundry saw several generations of Penningtons casting bells for a number of churches in Exeter and beyond (e.g. the four bells in St Mary Steps church all came from the foundry in Paul Street, the remains of which now lie under the Harlequins shopping centre).

The photograph below right © Devon County Council shows an area known as Lake's Cottages. This too had been flattened by 1920. From a historical and architectural perspective, disaster struck at the beginning of the 20th century. However well-meaning they might've been, the slum clearances which swept Exeter during the 1920s and 1930s destroyed the vast majority of medieval and post-medieval timber-frame houses which had survived into the 20th century and almost no record was made of what exactly was being destroyed. In Paul Street, Smythen Street, Preston Street, Stepcote Hill, Frog Street, Edmund Street and Catherine Street, numerous ancient properties and centuries-old alleys were simply flattened.

Similar slum clearance operations were carried out in cities all across Britain by local authorities with either little or no regard for the historical or architectural value of what was being destroyed. Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, most of Coventry's most picturesque medieval streets, such as Great Butcher Row and Little Butcher Row, had been demolished in the mid-1930s, several years before the first German bombs fell on the city.

Often, as at Exeter, the clearances resulted in the removal of the oldest and most interesting houses. These houses might've been slums in the 20th century but when built in the 1500s and 1600s they were the townhouses of some of the city's exceptionally wealthy merchants. The richness of the architecture and the history it represented meant nothing as the entire area was pulled down, irrespective its historical value. As the Cornish-born author Anne Treneer quite rightly said: "We had blasted much beauty ourselves before the Germans came to work more rapid destruction for us, breaking in a mad few hours the cohesion of centuries."

The street plan for 1905 shows that many buildings fronting the street and in the alleyways behind still existed on narrow medieval tenement plots that had been in use for hundreds of years. Starting in 1913 the entire area between St Paul's church and the city wall was demolished. The many families who lived there were relocated to newly-built houses in the suburbs and the empty lot to the north of Paul Street was used as a bus station until as recently as the 1980s.

According to the Westcountry Studies Library, from whose archive it came, the photograph left © Devon County Council was taken during the demolition of 14th century houses on Paul Street, although a date of c1530 is perhaps more accurate.

Fortunately, just prior to the complete demolition of the north side of Paul Street, a number of photographs were taken which showed some of the areas lost. Nothing was saved and, apart from these images, very little was recorded. There is now simply no way of knowing what once existed on the street. Another narrow alleyway was called Maddock's Row and was accessed via a small archway which had been let into the city wall at the back of the tenements (the archway still survives today behind the tawdry expanse of the Harlequins shopping centre). In fact hardly a single building survived on the north side of Paul Street from its junction with Lower North Street up to its junction with Queen Street. After the demolitions the site was left empty, to be used as a bus station until the Harlequins shopping centre was constructed in the 1980s. In 1931, just a few years after the most destructive of the clearances, Harbottle Reed wrote that "most of the vanished buildings were of over-sailing timber framing, some of elaborate character".

Another image from the archives of the Westcountry Studies Library right © Devon County Council shows Cornish Court just prior to its demolition. The south side of Paul Street survived relatively intact although ironically the buildings here, with the exception of St Paul's church, were both historically and architecturally of lesser importance. The late-17th century parish church came down in 1936 and in the 1970s, with the construction of the Guildhall Shopping Centre, every single surviving building on the south side of Paul Street, from Queen Street down to North Street, was bulldozed by Exeter City Council, part of the ironically named 'Golden Heart Project' which ripped much of the remaining pre-war cityscape to shreds.

The consequences of the pre-war slum clearances and the post-war redevelopment are nothing more than disastrous. It is a bitter irony that this area of Exeter was left completely untouched by bombs in 1942. There's not much to say about Paul Street today really, apart from the fact that it's often choked with cars and comprises one of the least appealing cityscapes in Exeter. Considering it was a tightly-knit community for over one thousand year there is rarely a pedestrian in sight. The south side of Paul Street consists of nothing but the towering monolithic backside of the Guildhall shopping precinct. The north side is just a car park with entrance into yet another shopping precinct. After nearly 2000 years Paul Street is now without any visible historical or aesthetic value whatsoever and without a single surviving building which predates 1970. The only feature of interest are the remains of the city wall which are hidden behind the Harlequins shopping centre. Today Paul Street looks like this:

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The Destruction of Exeter in the 20th Century

The reason I started this blog was because of an argument I had recently with someone who claimed that Exeter was a lovely city with 'lots of historic buildings'. I was surprised as I didn't see how anyone could think that Exeter had 'lots of historic buildings' when so many of them have been destroyed within the last century.

It's true that the ancient heart of Exeter has a number of exceptionally fine and historically important buildings, and you can almost count them on the fingers of two hands: the Cathedral, the Castle at Rougemont, the Guildhall, a number of medieval properties in the Cathedral Close, three superb terraces of Georgian townhouses, St Nicholas's Priory, about a dozen surviving timber-frame merchant houses, a few interesting 15th century parish churches and one street of good Victorian public buildings, including the remains of the Higher Market and the neo-Gothic museum. Around 70% of the City Wall also survives, although this is largely overlooked.

To say that Exeter has 'lots of historic buildings' is simply misleading. It does have 'lots' compared with Milton Keynes but Exeter is a 2000-year-old city, and for almost 1800 of those years it was one of the most important cities in England.

Another widely-believed fallacy is that Exeter was destroyed during World War Two. It was not. It has been said to me more than once, and by more than one person, that the city council merely finished what the Germans started. But even this is untrue in some aspects, as the damage inflicted on the city in 1942 didn't even set a precedent. The city authorities had been pulling vast areas of the city down from the end of the 19th century onwards.

The map left illustrates the immediate damage from the aftermath of the Baedeker Raid of 4 May 1942 transposed onto a map of 1890. These are the areas that were severely or partially damaged by high explosive bombs, incendiaries and the resulting fires. The outline of the city wall is shown in blue. The city wall area contained the city's oldest buildings and its most important buildings. As can be seen, the damage was extensive and there's no doubt that the damage to Exeter's architectural heritage was immense, including such landmark buildings as Bampfylde House, Bedford Circus, the Chevalier Inn, the Hall of the Vicars Choral, St Lawrence's church and St Catherine's Almshouses. Half of the High Street was severely damaged along with significant portions of the medieval suburb of St Sidwell to the north-east and, in the centre of the city, the area at the top of Fore Street and parts of South Street.

The image right is the same 1890 map. Incredibly, the areas coloured in red show property that appears on the 1890 map but which has been destroyed over the course of the 20th century. Everything in red are entire blocks of buildings that have either been destroyed in war or bulldozed by the city authorities themselves.

The huge areas shown in white are open areas of grass, yards and gardens, the three most notable ones within the city walls being the Cathedral precinct, the Castle in the north-west corner and the cemetery in the south-west corner.

The areas in black show the only buildings which appear on the 1890 map and which are still present in the 21st century city. It is a tiny percentage. And it is an indisputable fact that the vast majority of the historic city centre dates to no earlier than 1900 at the very earliest.

As can be seen, today there are vast tracts of the city where there is literally nothing to see of Exeter's architectural past. It has just gone. Not just streets but entire districts have been flattened and rebuilt. Like a snake with its own tail in its mouth, the city has consumed itself almost totally, and it is no exaggeration to say that almost nothing remains. Half of Paul Street was demolished early in the 20th century, along with half of Catherine Street. The West Quarter, including Preston Street, Smythen Street, Coombe Street and Stepcote Hill, and which contained most of the city's surviving medieval and Tudor townhouses, was razed during the 1930s. The air-raid of 1942 accounted for half of South Street and the High Street as well as half of Southernhay, Paris Street and Sidwell Street and numerous small streets and alleys. The 1950s saw the demolition of most standing buildings in the war-damaged area as well as the remains of those which could've been salvaged. Exe Island and the Edwardian Exe Bridge were bulldozed in the 1950s and 1960s along with much of Cowick Street, Alphington Street, Mary Arches Street, Magdalen Street and a whole complex of 17th and 18th century buildings at Southgate for the construction of the Western Way inner bypass. The eastern side of North Street, the remaining half of Paul Street, and nearly all of Goldsmith Street and Waterbeer Street came down in the 1970s to build the Guildhall Shopping Centre. Many roads have simply ceased to exist, like Bampfylde Street, George Street, Musgrave Alley, St Stephen Street, Sun Street, etc. etc. It terms of Exeter's historical architecture, it has been nothing but a disaster.

A Medieval Fireplace in Smythen Street

In 1963, while the remaining fragments of historical Smythen Street was being demolished, a 15th century fireplace was uncovered embedded in the wall of a warehouse.

The warehouse dates to c1900 but the fireplace is in its original position. In the early 18th century the medieval house containing the fireplace was remodelled, retaining at least the side wall and the fireplace. The warehouse was then constructed against the wall of the remodelled medieval building and it was this structure that was demolished in 1963.

I took a photograph of the evidence left. The right-side of the fireplace is constructed of the red Heavitree breccia that was widely used in the city for centuries. The lintel is made of the local purple volcanic trap with a strengthening arch above. The photo below shows Smythen Street today, used since the 9th century and formerly one of the main roads through Exeter in the High to Late Middle Ages. Only the late Victorian pub to the left provides a few traces of historic interest, but No. 30, visible in the distance in the distance with a corrugated metal wall, is thought to be a unique remnant of the medieval Butchers Row. Unfortunately it is soon to be largely demolished.

Smythen Street: Exeter in the Middle Ages

It's hard to believe it today, but in the 11th to 14th centuries Smythen Street, shown left c1905, was one of the principal medieval roads in Exeter. It was essentially a continuation of Stepcote Hill, which together with Smythen Street is believed to have functioned as the main access route into the centre of Exeter from the west.

As a street it has almost certainly been in existence since the 9th century, possibly even since the Romans first laid out the city in the 2nd century. In 1823 some workmen digging in the street unearthed a "curious medal in fine preservation" upon which was an image of the 4th century Roman Emperor Flavius Magnus Magnentius. (People at the time commented upon the resemblance between the face on the medal and that of Napoleon who had died two years earlier.) Excavations in 1931 on the south side of Smythen Street revealed the remains of a small stone-walled room, made from the same purple volcanic trap as the Roman city walls, which was believed to be the remains of a hypocaust. Exeter's Roman citizens certainly lived within the vicinity nearly 2000 years ago.

The name of the street, first recorded in the 11th century, derives from the use of the area as place where many of the city's blacksmiths both worked and traded. In Donn's 1765 map of Exeter the street is called 'Smithing Street' and on another map of 1832 the entire street is known as 'Butchers Row'. For many centuries the term 'Butchers Row' was interchangeable with 'Smythen Street'. Up until the 16th century the entire area would've been a complex of winding alleyways and courts, with warehouses and merchant houses built on narrow tenements vying for position on the street front.

A canon at Exeter Cathedral gave several tenements situated in Smythen Street to the quasi-ecclesiastical Kalendar Brethren in 1271. In the late 15th century a series of butcher shops were built at the top end of the street, and this part of the street became officially known as Butchers Row. As its name suggests, this was the place from which the city's butchers operated from 1499 until the 1830s.

The Butchers Row, or Smythen Street, right had probably changed little since the 15th century when Jenkins described it in 1806: "[It] consists of a narrow street, the buildings, in general, low and mean, with heaving hanging window-shutters; here the knights of steel reside in a kind of community among themselves". It seems like a strange place for the trade, given the topography of the city. Every day the butchers would sweep out their shops and slaughterhouses and the resulting mix of water, blood, dung and offal would've flowed freely down a central gutter in the middle of the street, down through the rest of Smythen Street, down past the doorsteps of those living in Stepcote Hill, before being channelled off into the nearby river Exe. It was, said Jenkins, a "noisome place in the summer". It must've stank to high heaven.

The image left shows a detail from Hedgeland's wooden model of Exeter depicting the city as it existed in 1769 and which can be seen in the city museum. All of the houses which fronted onto Smythen Street are highlighted in red. The street seamlessly merged with Stepcote Hill at the bottom. At the top of the street one could turn left or right into Milk Street or continue up via a slight deviation into George Street. When Hedgeland created his model between 1817 and 1824 the narrow street would've still been lined on both sides primarily with timber-framed houses from the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, their jettied upper floors oversailing the pavement below. (The upper third of the street was demolished to build the Lower Market in the 1830s.)

The Protestant martyr, Thomas Benet, was living and teaching in Smythen Street when he was arrested for heresy. He was burnt at the stake at Livery Dole on the outskirts of the city on 15 January 1531. By the 1830s, like the rest of Exeter's formerly prestigious medieval West Quarter, the street was a notorious slum. An outbreak of cholera in 1832 resulted in the order for burning barrels of tar to be placed in the city's most densely populated areas (including Smythen Street shown below right), the idea being that the smoke from the burning tar would purify the air. It had always been the location for a number of inns and taverns, including The Unicorn, The Coachmaker's Arms and The Golden Fleece. One Mary Dixon was fined five shillings for using "very disgusting language" near to The Golden Fleece in 1850.

The street retained its medieval character almost intact until the 19th century. The first part to go were many of the old butchers' shops. In the 1830s Exeter's prestigious Lower Market building was opened, a purpose-built place specifically designed to cater for the city's meat trade as well as functioning as a corn exchange.

The construction of the Lower Market truncated Smythen Street and resulted in the demolition of much of Butchers Row. The rest of ancient Smythen Street disappeared gradually until the great slum clearances of the 1930s destroyed much of what was left. There were at least two timber-framed buildings from the 17th century in the street until at least 1949 but these were subsequently demolished.

The street today, like most of the old West Quarter, is a barren wasteland, with just a late-Victorian warehouse, a late-Victorian pub, some bland and nondescript modern housing and a large car park. Preston Street, which runs parallel with Smythen Street, is little better and both are truncated to the south-west by the post-war four-lane inner bypass road. There is almost nothing of interest to be seen and nothing to evoke the street's very long history. Two small fragments do however remain. The first a solitary medieval fireplace hanging high on the wall of a late-19th century warehouse. It is so pitiful a sight that one almost wishes that it wasn't there at all. The other fragment is the much-altered remains of No. 30 Smythen Street. It is believed to be a unique remnant of the last of the houses which comprised Butchers Row. Unfortunately it has recently been threatened with demolition.

Smythen Street is today a self-inflicted mess and no amount of redevelopment could compensate for the almost total loss of the street's historical fabric. The slum clearances left behind such a blighted landscape that the city's post-war town-planner, Thomas Sharp, likened Smythen Street and others affected in the 1930s to those parts of the city which had been bombed in 1942. I've lived in Exeter for nearly 40 years and I've probably been down Smythen Street two or three times at the most. Today it looks like this:

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The Slum Clearance of Stepcote Hill

At the beginning of the 20th century Stepcote Hill in Exeter's ancient West Quarter was a magnet for artists and photographers wanting to capture both the social life of Britain's poor and a visual reminder of England's medieval past. The image left shows Stepcote Hill c1890 as it ascended the steep slope towards the plateau on which most of the historic city was built, and still lined with numerous late medieval and early post-medieval timber houses.

It has been conjectured that the route itself is Roman in origin but in the Middle Ages Stepcote Hill was probably the main thoroughfare into Exeter from the west. Having crossed the medieval Exe Bridge, you would've passed under the West Gate set into the city wall before travelling up into the city itself. The street only fell out of use in the 1770s when a new bridge replaced the old medieval one.

According to Hoskins the name itself derives from the Anglo-Saxon word 'stype', meaning 'steep', and even today it remains the steepest route into the city. 'Cote' probably comes from the Anglo-Saxon word for an enclosure. It's recorded c1270 as Styppecotehyll.

As befitted a major thoroughfare, Stepcote Hill was once lined with the houses of Exeter's wealthiest medieval merchants, eager to have premises in what was essentially Exeter's commercial centre. Much of the rest of the land contained within the city's encircling defensive wall was taken up with the ecclesiastical precincts of various churches and monasteries, especially the Benedictine foundation of St Nicholas, the Dominican friary near the East Gate and the Cathedral precinct itself. This part of Exeter, including Smythen Street, Preston Street and Coombe Street was therefore a mainly secular maze of narrow lanes, courts and streets consisting of merchant houses, workshops and warehouses, known collectively as the West Quarter. For a map showing the extraordinary extent of demolition in the West Quarter during the 20th century see the post on the church of St Mary Major.

After the land-grab of the Reformation many more domestic properties were built on land once owned by the religious houses and gradually, over a period of several centuries until the 1800s, the social and economic importance of Stepcote Hill, and the West Quarter generally, diminished, even if much of its medieval architecture remained intact.

The photograh left shows the narrow entrance into Stepcote Hill from West Street c1930, the medieval church of St Mary Steps just visible on the left. By the 19th century the area was a notorious slum and the frequent location of outbreaks of cholera and in the 1930s the city authorities decided to relocate the poorest inhabitants to a new area beyond the city wall. However well-meaning the philanthropic intent, it was a catastrophe for Exeter's architectural heritage as every building on the Hill, including all the jettied, timber-frame merchant houses, was totally demolished without any record being made of what was being destroyed. Only one late-15th century house survived, on the corner of Stepcote Hill and West Street.

In the process Exeter lost some of its most important surviving medieval and 16th century domestic houses from one of its most important surviving medieval streets. Today there is little to see of any architectural or historical interest. The only remaining historical feature, apart from the corner house and the wall of St Mary Steps church, is the ancient cobbled street surface with its central gutter and steps on either side. This is Grade II listed. The city council website calls Stepcote Hill 'picturesque'. It really isn't. The merchant houses were all replaced with bland, functional brick-built properties that have little to recommend them and which wouldn't look out of place on any estate in any suburb in any city in the country.

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