ANDREW SWIFT – AUGUST v4.qxp_Layout 2 18/07/2022 14:21 Page 1
Thornbury High Street c1910
Looking
back
... at the market town of Thornbury. This month, Andrew Swift explores its history, its heritage and the debate surrounding “one of the best-preserved and most vibrant High Streets around”...
O
n the face of it, Thornbury may seem like a place where little has ever happened, where things change slowly, and where everyone gets on amicably. The last place, you might think, to be a flashpoint for one of the most contentious issues of our time – how to keep cars and pedestrians apart. Thornbury was laid out as a walled town in the mid-13th century, and its original street pattern still survives. When the antiquarian John Leland visited around 1540, he described its layout as being in the form ‘of the letter Y, having first one long street and two horns going out of it. There hath been good clothing in Thornbury, but now idleness much reigneth there.’ ‘Good clothing’ referred to the cloth trade, once the mainstay of the town’s prosperity, which had clearly fallen on hard times, and that ‘long street’ was the High Street, the venue for its weekly market. In 1803, when Thomas Rudge published his History of Gloucestershire, he recorded that ‘the clothing business is now entirely lost’, the market ‘is little attended’, and, while the town had ‘some good houses, and persons of property … with a few exceptions, the buildings are old and bad, and the inhabitants poor’. Good times were just around the corner, however. In the first half of the 19th century, Thornbury’s population rose by over 70%. Trade flooded into the town, cheese and livestock markets filled the High Street, new businesses were established and new buildings sprang up. The High Street’s two main inns, the Swan and the White Lion, in a bid to outshine each other, installed enormous statues – of a swan and a lion – above their porches. The dawn of the railway age sounded the knell for Thornbury’s brief renaissance, however. None of the lines that spread across Gloucestershire came anywhere near the town. When a railway did finally arrive, in 1872, it was a slow, single-track branch from Yate,
62 THE BRISTOL MAGAZINE
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AUGUST 2022
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No 213
with three trains a day. It did nothing to stem the town’s decline. Three years later a guidebook described Thornbury as ‘a quiet place, of little bustle or trade’, although it admitted that ‘its weekly market brings together a goodly number of farmers and others with the produce of the surrounding country’. Its population plummeted and by 1901 there were fewer people in the town than there had been a century earlier. Thereafter, Thornbury stagnated, and in 1944, as if to underline its decline, the railway, which had come so late, closed, making it one of the first towns in the country to lose its station. Today, though, Thornbury’s population – just over 3,000 in 1951 – stands at more than 12,500. Thornbury is thriving. But, because it was never industrialised, and because of that long period of decline, its three main streets still look much as they did in the early 19thcentury. Not only that, but virtually all modern development has been to the north-east of the town centre. So you can still turn off the High Street down narrow lanes which lead through gaps in the old borough walls into open country, where field paths and green lanes lead westward to the Severn shore. For an even more startling evocation of Regency times, you can stroll south along the High Street to Rosemount House, whose elegant verandas still look out across fields and woods to the distant line of the silvery Severn as they did when the house was built in 1836. Although Thornbury is characterised by modest, vernacular architecture, there are two buildings that are anything but modest. A third of a mile to the north, set amid fields, is St Mary’s, one of the most imposing churches in Gloucestershire, while beyond it lies a vast battlemented castle, which the Duke of Buckingham started to build around 1507. When he was executed for treason in 1521, it was still far from finished – although good enough for Henry VIII to stay there for ten days with Anne Boleyn while touring the West
