Urban Rambles by Nicholas Rudd-Jones

Author:Nicholas Rudd-Jones
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MBI
Published: 2018-05-22T04:00:00+00:00

‘We have time enough to finish the game and beat the Spaniards too’. SIR FRANCIS DRAKE, PLAYING BOWLS ON THE HOE

We slip through the car park just to the north of the church, then left up Finewell Street past the Prysten House, a Grade I listed fifteenth-century merchant’s house, now a restaurant. The Merchants’ House in St Andrew’s Street also dates back to the fifteenth century. Its first recorded owner was William Parker, an Elizabethan privateer and merchant and Mayor of Plymouth.

The Old Custom House (1586) on the Parade is now the rather quaint ‘Book Cupboard’. It too started life as a merchant’s house. The subsequent, grander Customs House, built in 1820, is on the other side of the Parade. As we stroll along Sutton Quay, we look up at the old warehouses lining it – where cargoes like sugar and pearls from South America and spices from the East Indies were unloaded in the days when Plymouth was a thriving port.

Sutton Harbour is where it all began. In about AD 700 Anglo-Saxon settlers sailed here, making their first settlement on its shore. In the sixteenth century, it was used as the base for the fleet that gathered to face the Spanish Armada. In 1620 the Pilgrim Fathers sailed to America from the Mayflower Steps at the western end of the harbour.

Today this whole area is known as the Barbican. A barbican is a fortified entrance, in this case referring to the waterside gateway of Plymouth’s long-gone medieval castle that stood on Lambhay Hill. But the street patterns still persist – a pattern that Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh would recognise, boasting the largest concentration of cobbled streets in England, with over 100 listed buildings, many dating back to Tudor and Jacobean times. What a sharp contrast to the ‘new town’ we have just come from.

The Old Fish Market (1896) (now the Edinburgh Woollen Mill) was a purpose-built harbour-side fish market. We mistake it at first for an old railway station, which is perhaps not surprising considering that the architect was principally a railway building designer.

New Street, as is often the way, turns out to be one of the city’s oldest streets and has several listed buildings (Nos 17, 18, 34 and 36, and the Elizabethan House Museum at No. 32) all of which were originally merchants’ houses. We pause for a few moments in the delightful Elizabethan Gardens at No. 34.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.