This month, Andrew Swift explores Thornbury’s history, its heritage and the debate surrounding “one of the best-preserved and most vibrant High Streets around”…
On 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, 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 19th-century.
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 Country a few years later. Thereafter, it fell into disrepair, and, although it was partially re-roofed in 1720, full restoration had to wait until 1854. It’s now a luxury hotel, making much of its Tudor connections.
The castle is so remote from the town centre, though, that it would be possible for someone to visit Thornbury for years without being aware of its existence. It is the High Street that most people visit Thornbury for, and, on the face of it, it looks to be in rude health. Hardly any of its shops lie empty, and independent businesses – many of them clearly long established – seem to outnumber chains. The White Lion and the Swan are still very much in business, and their cast-iron statues still square up to each other across the street as they did two centuries ago. Next to the White Lion, in a 17th-century building that was a butcher’s for over 250 years, is Thornbury’s newest pub, the Butcher’s Hook, still fitted out with wood panelling and period features. With pubs across the land closing at an unprecedented rate, the opening of a new one on Thornbury’s High Street is a sure sign of confidence in its future.
It is not so much history and heritage that characterises the High Street as a sense of continuity. As the town has grown, it has been repurposed to serve changing demands and shopping patterns. Today, though, it faces a new challenge, with the implementation of changes which – depending on your point of view – will either provide a much needed boost or lead to its demise.
In June 2020, South Gloucestershire Council closed the High Street to through traffic to help shoppers comply with social distancing. A few months later, they announced that they wanted the changes to be made permanent, claiming that it would increase footfall and give people more of a reason to visit their local high street. Many disagreed, claiming the changes would ‘wreck the economy of the High Street’, and were tantamount to the ‘destruction of Thornbury’.
As the debate rumbled on, in May 2022 Thornbury Town Council organised a poll, asking residents if they wanted the High Street reopened as a through route with parking bays on both sides. The result was overwhelming – 72% of voters wanted the changes scrapped – although only 23% of those eligible to vote did so.
The benefits of pedestrianisation to local businesses will always be mixed. For some traders, it may mean the loss of customers who relied on parking outside their premises. For pubs and cafes, on the other hand, it provides opportunities for expanding outside into territory once reserved for cars. In Thornbury, benches and tables have already begun to take over the former parking bays as a cafe culture slowly emerges.
For the moment, though, walking along Thornbury High Street at quieter times, when the loudest sound is that of your own footsteps, while undeniably pleasant, can be a little disorienting. But, while it gives you plenty time to reflect on what it must have been like in Regency times, it is impossible not to reflect on what it could be like in the future, enlivened by al fresco conversation, shouts of market traders, chatter and laughter from tables outside pubs and cafes, buskers, entertainers, events, mini-festivals … the possibilities are endless, and the crowds drawn in would surely take the place of those who no longer visit the High Street because they can’t park in it.
The move to make High Streets and other urban spaces places where people want to congregate, rather than places most people pass swiftly through, is a global one. Thirty years ago, there were those who wanted the dual carriageway running through the middle of Bristol’s Queen Square to stay where it was. We’ve come a long way since then, but, while recent road closure schemes in Bristol such as those on King Street and Cotham Hill have been broadly welcomed, others – such as those at Princess Victoria Street in Clifton and Sr Mark’s Road in Easton – have proved more divisive.
There can be little doubt, though, the trend to exclude cars from urban spaces will continue – as will the arguments. It can only be hoped that the prognostications of doom for Thornbury’s High Street prove unfounded, and that local traders and the local community can make it even more successful than it is now.
But enough of the arguments – why not visit Thornbury to see for yourself one of the best-preserved and most vibrant High Streets around, and perhaps take a walk to have a look at the castle and explore those green lanes leading westward?
