This article originally appeared in Wessex Chronicle Volume 16, Issue 2 (Summer 2015)
Jim Gunter’s annual tour for St Ealdhelm’s Day this year visited Salisbury. Jim’s notes for the our run to 50 pages and so only the faintest flavour of the experience can be reproduced here. We started at Crane Street Bridge, calling first at the nearby Diocesan Offices, still
with the original 15th century doors.
Then we were off into the city centre, stripping back the centuries to consider how Salisbury – New Sarum – has evolved since its foundation as a planned settlement in the 13th century. Some 170 new towns were built in England between 1066 and 1350, but Salisbury is the only one planned as a cathedral city and this shows in the contrast between the ecclesiastical Close and the Chequers, the grid plan of commercial streets to its north. Each block has a name, often taken from one of the pubs, as do many of the corners. Because the Bishop of Salisbury controlled the land and regulated its use, and because the records have survived, it is possible to trace which trades have used which streets when and even who was in residence. Modern street names are no guide to past uses as trades have moved around. Even the Poultry Cross
was originally the site where fruit and veg were sold; the original poultry market was in Silver Street. In the side streets, many mediæval buildings have survived relatively unchanged.
Even in the main streets, once it’s remembered that the shopfronts are new and that behind those Georgian windows lurk half-timbered buildings, on plots whose dimensions are fixed by ancient deeds, it becomes clear that the city remains remarkably true to its original plan. There’s been infilling (the Market Place today being about half its original size), plots have been amalgamated and sub-divided and roof lines have been raised
but look up or in and you see a different Salisbury from the one of chain stores and motor traffic. Two examples must suffice. Externally, the Odeon cinema on New Canal looks like modern mock Tudor.
Inside it’s something much older, its foyer
being the hall of a mediæval merchant’s house, restored in the 1830s by A W N Pugin, the neo-Gothic architect and designer who worked on the Houses of Parliament, and sensitively adapted in the 1930s by the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation. It’s a surreal experience to walk from the ticket counter to the auditorium by way of something that wouldn’t be out of place in a Harry Potter film. The hall was built between 1470 and 1483 by a Hall, John Hall, a leading Wiltshire wool dealer.We broke for coffee at the Boston Tea Party, whose premises occupy the former Old George Hotel in High Street. Upstairs is all half-timber, panelling and plaster, including some striking wyverns.
Occasionally, an old building emerges from its modern skin; the example on the corner of the Market Place
is now known as ‘Nuggs 1268’, referring to the name of the first known occupier and the date of occupation, though this is of the plot not the building, which dates from a century or two later. A mere youngster by Salisbury standards. Besides its ancient tradition of commerce, Salisbury also has a fine heritage of public buildings, such as the Guildhall (the latest of several civic chambers that have moved location around the Market Place), St Thomas’ Church with its dramatic ‘Doom’ painting and local coats-of-arms, St Edmund’s Church and numerous imposing almshouses.After lunch at our usual venue, the Royal George, we searched the grounds of Wiltshire County Council’s offices, further up on Bedwin Street, for an 17th century urn.
It marks the spot where some old armour was discovered and assigned at the time to the Anglo-Saxon era, relics, it was thought, of King Cynric’s battle against the Britons in 552.
The Latin inscription is worn now but starts off with a reference to ‘Cynricus, Occidentalium Saxonum Rex’. So close to our regular meeting point and all that; we couldn’t have planned it better.