A Pleasing Prospect extract
Taken from Chapter 2: Status in stone
Town space and urban renaissance
Despite the fact that it was a sizeable and significant town, in 1700 much of Colchester remained confined within its Roman walls, apart from a few streets to the south and east, the habitations at the Hythe (Colchester’s port) and ribbon developments down East Hill. It was situated on a ‘fine eminence’; a gravel hill which encouraged the springs and water courses that provided a good water supply.1 The River Colne described a wide circuit around the town, bridged at the foot of North and East Hills and again at the Hythe, about a mile east of the main centre. Following the original Roman street grid, Colchester town centre was bisected west to east by a broad High Street running downhill, whose continuation outside the walls was East Hill. At its west end this axis was crossed by another, south to north, comprising Head Street and North Hill. Apart from Botolph Street which wound round outside the town wall to the south-east, linking the High Street to the road to the Hythe, and Gutter Street and Crouch Street, which led into the London road to the south-west, these were the main thoroughfares of the town. Colchester Castle stood behind the main street in All Saints parish at the bottom of the High Street, partly hidden from view by a row of recently built small shops and houses. Larger houses, shops and inns fronted the main roads, while minor lanes divided up the populated areas behind the High Street which contained numerous small houses and shops (especially in the weavers’ area around Angel and Bear Lanes) and several larger mansions. Many poorer inhabitants were domiciled in courts and closes, tucked behind the larger streets or to the south in the lanes outside the town walls.2
Though Celia Fiennes was impressed by the neatness of the streets in 1698 and in 1722 Defoe thought them ‘fair and beautiful’, Colchester had a very mixed profile of urban topography. As Defoe went on, ‘tho’ … (Colchester) … may not be said to be finely built, yet there are abundance of good and well-built houses’:3 in other words, practical premises combining domestic and business use for baymakers, rather than the use of architecture to produce the urban prospects that would have pleased polite taste later in the century. The eighteenth century saw a ‘renewal and transformation of the (urban) landscape’ in English towns, both large and small.4 In Colchester’s case many major buildings including the castle and several churches were dilapidated or partially ruined in 1700. The marks of damage left by the siege of 1648 were by no means eradicated. Early eighteenth-century renovations to St Marys church and later to the castle, St Nicholas and St Peters were undertaken piecemeal, financed by local patrons or owners. However, with the exception of a theatre, built behind the frontage of the Moot Hall in 1764, Colchester did not acquire any completely new prestige public buildings.
The adoption of classical architectural style in place of existing vernacular radically altered the fashionable face of domestic buildings. Light, air and cleanliness were the rational desiderata of the urban landscape. Classical architecture was rule-based, and by adopting its principles alongside the wide dissemination of builders’ pattern books, provincial builders and architects could readily reproduce the approved style. Colchester builder, William Salmon, was the author of a widely used pattern book, his Palladio Londoniensis.5 Together, owners’ renovations (each individual but conforming stylistically) produced distinctive Georgian vistas in central areas of the town. Like other provincial towns, for the most part Colchester adopted simplicity and ‘general moderation’ in its classical architecture rather than the extravagance of baroque; less perhaps a matter of aesthetic taste and more to do with the practice of local builders working to pattern and the imitation of fashionable style.6 A new ‘capital messuage’ was expensive. A builder’s estimate for a ‘Double Town House’ came to £1,100 in the 1740s.7 Hugh Osborne, a wealthy town gentleman, spent over £4,000 in purchasing, renovating and re-furnishing a mansion in Head Street in the 1760s and 70s.8 Nevertheless, across the eighteenth century, Colchester acquired a number of elegant new houses and mansions in the classical style. Red brick was most widely used in Colchester, but with the production of ‘gault’ brick by a supplier in Marks Tey from 1766, numbers of houses in Crouch Street and Lexden Road built in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are of white brick.9
Notes:
1. P. Morant, The history and antiquities of the most ancient town of Colchester (Colchester, 1748), book 1, p. 1; B. Strutt, The history and description of Colchester (Colchester, 1803),Vol. 2, p. 1; A. Phillips, Ten men and Colchester (Chelmsford, 1985), Chapter 1.
2. J. Cooper et al., The borough of Colchester, Victoria county history of Essex, Vol. 9 (Woodbridge, 1994): Georgian Colchester: Topography, pp. 147–53.
3. Cited in G. Martin, The story of Colchester (Colchester, 1959), p. 70.
4. P. Borsay, The English urban renaissance: culture and society and the provincial town (Oxford, 1989), p. 41.
5. W. Salmon, Palladio Londinensis or London art of building, 1st edn, (London, 1734), had reached its eighth edition by 1773; JBB BD/1213; H.M. Colvin, A biographical dictionary of British architects, 1600–1840 (New Haven, Conn., 1995).
6. Borsay, The English urban renaissance, pp. 61–3; Cooper et al., Colchester, p. 151.
7. ERO D/DRc 27, James Deane's builders' book.
8. J. Bensusan Butt, 'Typed Boggis Notes III', ERO Acc 905, Box 2.
9. Royal Commission on Historic Monuments for England, North East Essex,Vol. 3 (London, 1922), p. 56.