Landscape History Today: the Bulletin of CSLH January 2014 Number 54 Dairy Farm, Weobley Contents Chair’s Message 3 I do like to be beside the seaside ... 4 Church Open! 15 Follow the Arrow, the Lugg and the Wye 18 Restoring Blanche 27 The Year Ahead ... 30 Nantwich - then and now 39 Dates for the diary Members may be interested in the following event ... Saturday 26th April 2014 - Cheshire Archaeology Day Centre for North-West Regional Studies, Lancaster University Programme of events 2014 http://www.lancs.ac.uk/users/cnwrs/events/index.htm Editor: Dr. Sharon Varey, Meadow Brook, 49 Peel Crescent, Ashton Hayes, Cheshire, CH3 8DA Email: [email protected] Web: www.chesterlandscapehistory.org.uk Page 2 Chair’s Message Welcome to the January edition of the Bulletin. First of all, a big ‘thank you’ to everyone who renewed their CSLH membership at the November lecture. This is a really great help to the Society enabling us to keep stationery and postage costs down to a minimum. Autumn 2013 was a busy time for the Planning Team, putting in place a varied programme of lectures, visits and events for 2014. As you will be aware, there has been a ‘cabinet reshuffle’ amongst Planning Team members with Diane Johnson becoming Lectures organiser and Gwilym Hughes organising and overseeing our field visits programme. In recent months, Diane and Gwilym have been working closely with Mike (H) and Mike (T) to ensure a seamless handover. Unfortunately, due to circumstances beyond our control, there will be no residential break this year. We know this will be a great disappointment to many members, but rest assured, plans are already well underway for 2015! However, we are running an additional event this year. Entitled ‘Nantwich Then and Now – Discover, Discuss and Dine’ we are attempting to combine ‘in a day’ elements of a residential and field visit alongside an opportunity to socialise. Intrigued? Well, turn to page 39 for further details. CSLH is very fortunate to have such a talented membership. As you will be aware, the Planning Team will be losing three valuable members at the forthcoming AGM in February. Mike Taylor as well as Jennifer and Mike Kennerley have decided to ‘step-down’ from their organising roles. I am sure everyone would like to thank them for what they have done for the Society over the years and I hope they continue to enjoy the Society’s events ‘from the other side’. Meetings will not be the same without Mike K’s little anecdotes and stories! If anyone is interested in joining the Planning Team at the AGM, please let us know. Finally, on behalf of the Planning Team, I would like to wish you all a very happy new year. We look forward to seeing you at one of our Spring lectures. Sharon Varey Page 3 I do like to be beside the seaside ... ... the early days of Llandudno and its suburbs Sea-bathing was good for your health. As a result it became fashionable as a leisure activity, spreading down through the social classes with the arrival of the railway. So runs the conventional account. In 1795, though, Joseph Hucks, visiting Abergele, described as ‘a small watering place’, was surprised to see that ‘the inferior orders of people commonly bathe, without the usual precautions of machines and dresses’.1 This sounds as if they were simply taking a bath (and having fun) rather than seeking a health cure. They certainly hadn’t come by train. Figure 1 Location map showing areas mentioned in the text © OpenStreetMap and contributors, under an open licence Page 4 Figure 2 Llandudno Every foundation needs a foundation myth. Llandudno’s is well known. Edward Mostyn promoted the Eglwysrhos, Llandudno and Llangystennin Enclosure Act,2 which was passed in 1843. The accompanying Award, which allocated the majority of the common land of Llandudno (832 acres or 337 hectares) to Mostyn, was delivered in 1848. Between these dates, in 1846, the Anglesey surveyor Owen Williams visited the area for a meeting of the shareholders of the Great Orme copper mines. He mentioned to John Williams that the low-lying tract of marshy and sandy ground between the Great Orme and the Little Orme, on a peninsula with beaches facing in two directions, would make an ideal site for a seaside resort. John Williams was secretary to the Ty Gwyn mine company, but also Edward Mostyn’s land agent. Mostyn and Owen Williams met in the spring of 1847. They sheltered from the rain in a boatman’s hut as they planned the new seaside resort. An auction of land was duly held at Plas Mawr, Conwy, on 28 - 29 August 1849. It was rather a flop for only seven plots were sold on the first day.3 Can we believe that the idea of creating a new resort had not occurred to Mostyn and his henchmen before the lightbulb flashed above Owen Williams’s Page 5 head? Like most people living near the coast of north Wales, the local people had scraped a living from the meagre resources of their environment - generally poor land, the sea, and mineral resources. Limestone outcrops on the headlands in this area and has been extensively quarried, but the most valuable resource was the copper ores buried under the Great Orme. As is now well known, these have been mined extensively since the Bronze Age. In the mid-nineteenth century, however, things were not going well with the copper mines of the district. The Old Mine had the highest recorded production figures of any copper mine in Snowdonia, but the Llandudno mines were never highly profitable. Continuous investment was needed to prevent flooding. The Old Mine levels flooded in 1853, and the Ty Gwyn mine flooded in 1844 and again in 1850. The two decisive events that shaped the early rise of Llandudno occurred in the late 1840s and the mid-fifties. The Chester and Holyhead Railway Company opened the line from Chester to Bangor in 1848. Edward Parry published his Railway Companion from Chester to Holyhead the same year. In his second edition of 1849 we read ‘Llandidno of late years has become a favourite resort for strangers during the bathing season’,4 suggesting that tourists were visiting Llandudno before Owen Williams met Edward Mostyn in 1847. In fact, the advertisement for the auction of 1849 described the offer as ‘eligible building land in that romantic, picturesque, and interesting watering place, Llandudno’. Even allowing for sales hype, this implies that development, or at least commercialisation, had been afoot for a number of years. The second event was the removal of tariff barriers in the 1850s, causing the bottom to fall out of the copper market. In 1853, miners at the Old Mine went on strike, and many did not return to work in the mine. They clearly saw the possibility of a future income elsewhere. Llandudno was to be developed as a Mostyn estate town. The two main axes are Mostyn Street and Gloddaeth Street. Lloyd Street is the main subsidiary axis, and minor thoroughfares are called Augusta Street, Vaughan Street and so on. These are all Mostyn family names. Just as significantly, they are all called ‘Street’. Apart from one or two roads on the periphery, the Mostyns had no Page 6 Page 7 truck with Avenues, Crescents, Boulevards and the like (though there were Walks, as we shall see). This was to be a commercial centre as well as a resort. Very little land was sold freehold. It was practically all leasehold (and still is). Detailed building regulations were drawn up. These not only covered general concerns such as the prohibition of cellar-dwellings and court-dwellings that the Victorians saw as quickly degenerating into slums, but went into such detail as the size and shape of windows in different storeys. The streets were laid out broad, and buildings were not to rise higher than the width of the street. In 1853, the St George’s Harbour and Railway Company gained parliamentary approval for the development of a harbour that was first intended to replace Holyhead as the main port for Irish traffic and later to export coal from Denbighshire, with Llandudno renamed Port Wrexham. All that came of this was a ‘useless ornament’ of a pier that was built in 1858 and washed away in a storm in 1859.5 Nor did the town grow as rapidly as its developers would have wished. Llandudno was surveyed by the Ordnance Survey at a scale of 1:500 in 1858. The Mostyn MSS at Flintshire Record Office contains a plan at the same scale apparently based on this, showing the names of all the lessees of Mostyn lands.6 Although the land had been let, little of it was built on apart from the area bounded by Vaughan Street and Madoc Street on the east and south. On the third edition of the O.S. one-inch map, surveyed 1903-4, although Gloddaeth Street crosses the isthmus, Trinity Avenue stops at the southern boundary of the town centre - Maelgwyn Road and St David’s Road. Residential development appears to be planned just west of the railway line on the West Shore, as is shown by pecked lines. By the fourth edition (surveyed 1918-19), although Trinity Avenue now crosses the isthmus, little else has changed. The small Afon Creuddyn, which has now been culverted, is still shown sweeping round from Maelgwyn Road to the Links Hotel. Presumably, it was originally one of the waters draining into Y Ffos Fawr (‘the Big Ditch’), which emptied into the sea on the site of Prince Edward Square (and thus followed the line of Gloddaeth Street).