High Street Section 1
Winchester's High Street
The High Street of the City of Winchester is one of the oldest roads in the world, formed on a natural line of communication between the western downs and a crossing of the River Itchen at the eastern end of the town. Stand at the western side of the Westgate's central arch, or on the top of St Giles' Hill; the street's importance as a thoroughfare becomes obvious, though its architectural values need to be studied at closer quarters. First and second floor High Street architecture is often superb, but at ground-floor level modern forms of advertising and plate glass windows have not always improved the overall effect. It would be a sad day for Winchester and the nation if this High Street was to become just a mere counterpart of other streets in less fortunate cities, for this is a street which is much more than a thoroughfare. It is a link in the passage-way of time, it speaks of the continuity of civilization, of a city whose prosperity has rarely been displayed by a strident architectural form, a city whose citizens have had due regard for the domestic scale of the place, where change was once slow, and adaptations, refacing, repair and small improvement was much more common than demolition and wholesale redevelopment.
The recent paving of part of the street as a pedestrian precinct has been much discussed. The mediaeval Wintonian was supposed to 'pave' in front of his own property and to the middle of the road, but it was a difficult obligation to enforce. The Corporation of 1652, supporters of Cromwell, tried to get this done, and also collected money for paving, but there was trouble after the Restoration when it was found that some of the surfaces were made up with tomb-stones. When Charles II came to Winchester in August 1683, the inhabitants were required to hang out lights in front of their houses, sweep their part of the road, and repair it. By the time that the Paving Commission for Winchester was set up in 1770, the High Street was still virtually unsurfaced, and without real foot pavements, unlighted (except on special occasions) and the buildings were unnumbered. In official documents used for the collection of ancient rents (the Tarrages), eighteenth-century properties were still being described in terms of their owners at the end of the fourteenth century. The Paving Commissioners met for the first "time on 7 January 1771, and a month later (11 February) ordered that the High Street should be numbered". Soon they were thinking in only too familiar ways of how to get the traffic along more quickly, and trying to buy the Black Swan on the corner of Southgate Street in order to widen that turning. They succeeded, in part, and-went on to fill in the surface holes with gravel dug from Carew Gauntlett's field outside Southgate. Gauntlett was one of the Commissioners. Next, they paved the High Street carriage way with a good surface of flints. The work was done by a bricklayer, William Kernot, and two firms of stonemasons, Leversuch and Walklin. A footway for pedestrians was constructed on the north side of the street, and the entrances to the side streets were likewise 'paved', with flints. A major task attempted was the partial levelling of the hill leading to the County Hall, and there were problems of water drainage too, near Westgate. How to get rid of the rain water which poured down the High Street, flooding parts of the Pentice and the Cathedral churchyard had always been a Winchester problem, and it was not solved and then only partially, when the railway cutting was made in 1839-40. Paving Commissioners' work was expensive work, and had to be paid for by the inhabitants from local rates levied on each householder, and from tolls (from which the Judges and the Army were exempt) collected at the toll gates around the city. Much care was taken in 1785 to place the High Street lamps correctly, and bow windows could only be constructed with permission, since they were technically obstructions to free passage. On. 29 April 1791 the Commissioners started to make a footway through the Westgate, "at a cost not exceeding fifty pounds", and this was done on the Northern side, with the help of a public subscription totalling £57 9s. A few years later, a request from the Barrack Department. to 'stop up' Gar Street (now Trafalgar Street) was agreed on the grounds that "the stopping up ... will keep the City much more private from the Barracks", wishful thinking, for brawls between soldiers and civilians continued to be a feature of local life. The Commissioners in fact tried to oblige everyone, and when James Kellow, a well-known stone mason, asked for the Town Pump outside of his house near the High Cross, to be moved, they agreed at once, and it was shifted to a place nearby occupied until recently by the Post Office letter box.
Apart from the Tarrages and the minute books of the Paving Commissioners there are other sources which make it easy to trace the descent of the High Street properties, indeed of property generally in central Winchester. The first detailed account of the High Street owners is in a manuscript commonly known as the Winchester Doomsday, two Surveys of the town made in 1110 and 1148. An important group of later mediaeval documents concern the transfer of real estate, properties of all kinds, sold or let by transactions recorded in the city court. These enrollments, with the Tarrages and the books of the Paving Commissioners, provide a well-known and comparatively easy method of tracing the descent of all kinds of buildings.
Rate books and directories carry on the story to the present day. The first real Directory was published in 1784 by a local bookseller, John Sadler, who went bankrupt shortly afterwards. Only those who paid were listed in this kind of book, so that it would be unwise to think that Sadler or any of his immediate successors represent the entire population. There were at least seven High Street grocers in his time.
Two of the great changes of recent years have not been architectural: Very little of Winchester High Street now belongs to the citizens and only a handful of people live in it. At the time of writing (March 1976) there are only a few electors living in a street which used to be crammed with Winchester families. Moreover, many of the centrally situated public houses, the hotels, and the churches which gave the High Street an evening life of its own have closed for ever. The bustle of daytime is deceptive and cannot hide the fact that perhaps the most urgent planning problem of the late 1970's is the need to keep the centre of Winchester alive.
The High Street is the spine of the old city centre and is joined throughout its length by side roads running north and south, small roads once paralleled by even narrower passages and lanes. Most of these useful pedestrian ways have disappeared, a process of change encouraged in" the sixteenth century when the Corporation allowed influential Wintonians to block them up by new building. Nevertheless, the High Street, with its side roads, still forms a street pattern of great antiquity, in some part Roman, in greater part Anglo-Saxon, owing its origin to the military needs of the garrison in the days of Alfred the Great and of his son Edward the Elder. It is this pattern which is displayed on the map drawn by William Godson in 1751, and which began to break up soon after, when Eastgate, Northgate and Southgate were demolished to make room for traffic. Godson's map is the first of its kind and needs to bestudied in conjunction with the splendid "East Prospect of Winchester" published by Nathaniel and Samuel Buck in 1736.
The great changes of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries occurred in the eastern end of the street. In c.1798 a central block of which had once belonged to St Mary's Abbey was pulled down by agreement between the then, owner, Thomas Weld and the Corporation. Henceforth this part of Winchester became known as the Broadway. Eastgate, which had also been the responsibility of the same Abbey, had been occasionally patched up by the Corporation before its demolition in 1768. (Westgate only survived because part of it was used as a billiard room, and the lease had not run out.) The new city bridge over the Itchen was designed in 1813 by George Forder, Surveyor to the Dean and Chapter, and paid for by public subscription. Up to this time the mansion house known since the reign of Charles II by the names of its successive owners Masons, Pentons, and Mildmays, had been a great feature of the north-eastern side of the High Street. The aged Dowager Lady Mildmay had no real need of it, and in 1844 the house was demolished, and a new street constructed through its gardens, "High Street East", with shops on the corner; two public houses, the Mildmay Arms and the Lawn Tavern are remembrances of things past. The covering-in at various times of the Brooks which had run open down the street for centuries was another major change in the appearance of central Winchester.