Winchester - discovering its lesser known history
Not many things in life are free these days, but on a heavy cloudy Saturday morning we truly struck gold. We hoped to learn more about the treasures and lesser known features of the city by joining one of the free "Winchester for Locals" Tours, being run to support March’s English Tourism Week. We joined the tour not knowing quite where we would be taken!
Our walk began next to the Guildhall in Abbey Gardens and were assured we would be avoiding the busy high street! From here, we admired the imposing statue of Alfred the Great that was designed by Hamo Thornycroft of the famed family of shipbuilders. We heard how Alfred had not been expected to become king, being the youngest of five siblings, However, he embraced his responsibilities vigorously. Under the tutelage of Bishop Swithun, he twice took a ‘Saxon gap year’ to visit the Pope in Rome. Rather than becoming a warlord or dictator, he approached his reign with a sense of public duty. He championed education, codified law and invented the burgh system (the forerunner of our contemporary borough system). His statue was commissioned on the thousandth anniversary of his death in 899 but at its unveiling in 1901, it was apparent that the granite block on which it rests was placed upside down, although it has remained that way ever since!
Next we made our way via Colebrook Street to the Water Garden, whose fate has become topical, having recently come up for sale, with fears that it could lead to being developed. [Update 02/08/2018: The Hampshire Chronicle reports that the City Council has protected the Garden from development by approving a tree preservation order (TPO)]. The Garden itself is not that new, dating back to the 1950's when terraced housing was demolished as part of a programme of wholesale slum clearance, an approach that was evident across many British towns and cities at the time. The garden was created afterwards by Sir Peter Smithers, MP for Winchester at the time, who developed the site for the benefit of the general public walking past on their way to the Cathedral.
Demolish or preserve?
In Winchester, these demolitions also destroyed much of the city’s medieval street pattern. The eventual backlash against such redevelopment led to the formation in 1957 of the Winchester Preservation Trust (later becoming the current City of Winchester Trust) with the ethos of conservation being placed at the core of advocating more sensitive approaches to planning. At that time over 500 houses were on the city's slum clearance programme, including several listed buildings. Although various individual battles were lost, gradually the recognition of the value of preserving the history, character and architecture of the city grew increasingly to the fore.
Nevertheless, recent campaigns such as that opposed to the initial corporate-style development plans for Silver Hill demonstrate that Winchester citizens still need to remain vigilant. Hopefully today’s unknown buyer of the Garden, will respect its existing character and the threat of any development will pass. A temporary tree preservation order has been put in place on the large magnolia growing at the rear of the garden, which may yet become permanent if sufficiently loud calls are heard by the current council.
From the Water Garden we passed the ’bricked up’ door in the wall that Charles II had built and used in order to visit his mistress, Nell Gwynn, who was not allowed to stay at the Deanery, but with whom he had two children.
We then paused at the Dean Garnier Garden with its unique view of the full span of the longest nave of any European cathedral. At one time, a royal palace was planned and designed for King Charles II by Christopher Wren on what we today know as Peninsula Barracks. His design, inspired by the Palace of Versailles, also envisaged its alignment with the west front of Winchester Cathedral via a series of stepped gardens. However, although progress was made before the King’s death in 1685, his successors appear to have been less enthusiastic about the project and so it remained unfinished. Although other uses were found for it, the palace was eventually destroyed by fire in 1894.
How different Winchester would be if this had all come to fruition! There is speculation that if the palace had been fully completed and it had appealed to future monarchs, the building of Buckingham Palace would not have been needed.
The cathedral is currently the subject of a major £25 million conservation project. As part of this, we were told that the bones kept in the renowned six Mortuary Chests and taken away for detailed examination (including DNA analysis), have now been returned. They have been thought to contain the remains of Saxon, Danish and early Norman kings, including those of King’s Egbert, Cnut and William Rufus. Preliminary findings have certainly revealed that these bones originate from the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman eras, but further research is continuing.
East end of the nave of Winchester Cathedral
No matter how worthy and necessary this conservation work might be, it seems doubtful that it will have the same impact in the public’s mind as that of William Walker. Beginning in 1906 and borrowing techniques developed in the creation of the London Underground, this deep sea diver worked heroically for 6 days a week over 6 years, 6 hours per day in extremely muddy and murky waters. He manoeuvred 25,000 bags of cement and other materials into position through 235 holes dug so as to underpin the collapsing east end of the cathedral and save the building from possible total collapse.
Trollope's surviving post box
Walking on through Cathedral Close, we passed Pilgrim’s School where its school hall once accommodated the pilgrims travelling to the cathedral and contains England's oldest surviving wood double hammer-beamed roof. Even though not larger, it is older than its equivalent at Westminster Hall. We then entered St Swithun-upon-Kingsgate, the oldest medieval church built into any city walls in the country. Outside Kingsgate, we learnt that the post box built into the wall opposite the Wykeham Arms is one of only two working post boxes of this kind remaining in the country that was designed by the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, who in his day job was a senior civil servant and credited with the introduction of the pillar box to Britain.
We now strolled along College Street, noticing a manhole cover designed by Thomas Crapper, an engineer better associated with flushing toilets, and passed the last residence of Jane Austen. At the entrance to Winchester College, we learnt that the school escaped any destruction when Winchester was attacked in the Civil War, as two of Cromwell’s senior commanders were 'Wykehamists' (old boys of the school), before passing Wolvesey Castle. Although only one third of the original castle building remains, this was the palace of the medieval Bishops of Winchester. Wandering on, we followed the line of the city wall running parallel to the river. This is not the original river course as the Romans had dug this channel to provide a moat for this section of the city wall.
Winchester City Mill
Our tour ended close to the Bishop on the Bridge pub. The bridge here is the site of the first stone bridge crossing the river built by Bishop Swithun. The current version was built in 1813, and as if it was a beast of burden, still stands up to the daily onslaught of coaches, lorries and cars today. Upstream, the nearby City Mill was the second ever building taken over by The National Trust and is today the oldest working mill in the country following its restarting in 2005.
Despite having lived in the city for many years, this was the first time we had participated in one of these tours and we realised how much we had not known about Winchester. Originally promoted as being 90 minutes long, the interest among both the participants and the guide meant we spent a full two hours wandering around. We were struck by how often features in Winchester seemed to be ‘the oldest ...’,’the longest ...’, ‘the only ...’ or at least perhaps the second ranked, which only goes to demonstrate what a place of treasures and fascination Winchester is. One can’t help wondering what we might be marvelling about if the town planners and councillors in the 1950's had not been so eager to clear the slums. If a conservation ethic had been in place then, the city today might have been even richer for it.
Practical tips
These tours are a fantastic way to appreciate the City, both for what it is today but also for how it might have been had history taken different paths and offer real value for money. The guides undertake a dedicated training programme and if our guide was anything to go by, they clearly have a deep well of knowledge to go with their unconstrained enthusiasm for their subject.
These tours largely focus on either the upper or lower parts of the city, but from time to time, and often linked with particular events or occasions, they will run more specialised or focused tours. From April until October there are tours every day, (except for Sundays in April and October) but in the winter months the tours are normally confined to Saturdays.
Their extensive programme of tours can be found, and booked at: http://winchestertouristguides.com/.
