Alnwick, Northumberland: A Study in Town-Plan AnalysisAuthor(s): M. R. G. ConzenSource: Transactions and Papers (Institute of British Geographers), No. 27 (1960), pp. iii+ix-xi+1+3-122Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute ofBritish Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/621094 .Accessed: 14/04/2011 23:08

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THE INSTITUTE OF BRITISH GEOGRAPHERS

PUBLICATION NO. 27

ALNWICK,

NORTHUMBERLAND

A STUDY IN

TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

M. R. G. CONZEN, M.A.

Senior Lecturer in Geography, King's College, in the University of Durham,

Newcastle upon Tyne

LONDON

ORGE PHILIP & SON, LTD.9 32 FLEET STREET, E.C.4

1960

Printed in Great Britain

CONTENTS Page

LIST OF FIGURES . . . . . . . . . . xi

LIST OF TABLES . . . . . . xi

LIST OF PLATES . . . . . . . . . . xi

PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . .

1

PART I. PROBLEMS OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS . . . 3

Chapter 1. The Aim and Scope in Town-Plan Analysis . 3

Chapter 2. The Method of Town-Plan Analysis . . 6

PART II. THE GROWTH OF ALNWICK'S BUILT-UP AREA . . . 11

Chapter 3. The General Pattern of Growth . . . 11

Chapter 4. Anglian Alnwick . . . . . . 13 Situation and Anglian Roads . 13 Site and Settlement Form . . 16

Chapter 5. Medieval and Early Modern Alnwick . . 20 Situation and Site . . . . . 20 Alnwick Castle . . . . 21

Bailiffgate . . . . . . 21 The Economic Development of the Manorial

Borough . . . . . 23 The Town Plan of the Early Manorial Borough 25 Market Colonization . . . 34 The Borough Extension . . . . 38 The Town-Wall . .. . . . 39

Walkergate . . . . . 41

Early Accretions . . . . . 43

Canongate . . . . . . 44 The Fields of Alnwick . . . . 46

Chapter 6. Later Georgian and Early Victorian Alnwick . 49 Economic and Social Development . . 49 The Structure and Expansion of the Built-up

Area in General . . . . . 52

Fringe-Belt Development . . . 56 The Repletion of the Old Town . . . 65 Arterial Ribbons . . . . . 69

Layouts . . . . . . . 71

Chapter 7. Mid- and Late Victorian Alnwick . . . 75 Alnwick as a Rural Service Centre . . 75 Repletion and Replacement in the Old Town . 76 Fringe-Belt Development . . . . 80

ix

CONTENTS

The New Residential Accretions in General . 82 New Layouts . . . . . . 85 Road Ribbons and Dispersed Development . 87

Chapter 8. Modern Alnwick . . . . . 89 Economic Function and Social Requirements 89 The Rate and General Mode of Recent Growth 90 Modern Changes in the Old Town. . . 92 Residential Plan-Units . . . . 97 Outer Fringe-Belt Development . . . 105

PART III. THE EXISTING TOWN PLAN OF ALNWICK 108

Chapter 9. Types of Plan-Units . . . . 108 The Ancient Borough Plan . . . . 108 Other Traditional Plan Types within the Old

Town . . . . . . .109 The Inner Fringe Belt . . . . . 110 The Traditional Arterial Ribbons . . . 111 Modern Plan-Units within the Old Town . 111 Late Georgian and Early Victorian Residential

Accretions . . . . . . 112 Mid- and Late Victorian Residential Accretions 112 Modern Residential Accretions . . . 113

Composite Ribbons . . . . . 113 The Intermediate and Outer Fringe Belts . 114

Chapter 10. The Geographical Structure of Alnwick's Town Plan . . . . . . . . 116

CONCLUSION . . . . . . . 119

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . 120

x

LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page

1. ALNWICK: GROWTH OF BUILT-UP AREA . . . 11

2. THE SITUATION OF ANGLIAN ALNWICK . . . 14

3. THE SITE OF MODERN ALNWICK . facing 17

4. THE SITE OF OLD ALNWICK 26

5. MEDIEVAL ALNWICK ...

27

6. HOLDINGS IN THE CENTRAL TRIANGLE OF ALNWICK, 1567 35

7. CANONGATE AND WALKERGATE . 42

8. BONDGATE WITHOUT AND UPPER CLAYPORT STREET . .45

9. THE FIELDS OF ALNWICK . facing 46 10. ALNWICK: OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1774 . . . . 57

11. ALNWICK: OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT in 1827 . . . . 60

12. ALNWICK: OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1851 . . . . 62

13. THE URBAN FRINGE BELTS OF ALNWICK . . . . . facing 64

14. TEASDALE'S YARD (FENKLE STREET), 1774-1956 .. . . 68

15. EARLIER DEVELOPMENT UNITS IN ALNWICK . . . . . 72

16. ALNWICK: OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1897 . . . . 76

17. ALNWICK: OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1921 . . . . 79

18. ALNWICK: OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1956 . . . 93

19. MODERN DEVELOPMENT UNITS IN ALNWICK . . . . . 101

20. ALNWICK: TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS . . .. facing 109

21. THE PLAN-DIVISIONS OF ALNWICK . . . facing 117

LIST OF TABLES Table Page

I. BURGAGE FRONTAGES IN THE OLDEST PART OF THE MEDIEVAL BOROUGH . . . . 33

II. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, C. 1750-1956 53

III. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, c. 1750-1851 . 54

IV. INCIDENCE OF RESIDENTIAL GROSS DENSITIES OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, c. 1750-1956 . 55

V. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, 1851-75 . 83

VI. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, 1875-97 . . 84

VII. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, 1897-1914 . . . . 85

VIII. GROWTH OF THE BUILT-UP AREA, 1827-1956 . . . 90

IX. BUILDING COVERAGE IN TEASDALE'S YARD, 1774-1956 . . . . 92

X. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, 1918-39 . 98 XI. RESIDENTIAL DEVELOPMENT OUTSIDE THE OLD TOWN, 1945-56

? . . 99

XII. COUNCIL HOUSING, 1897-1956 . . . . . . 100

LIST OF PLATES Plate

I. THE OLD TOWN FROM THE SOUTH-WEST . . . . . . " facing 20

II. THE CASTLE AND PART OF THE OLD TOWN FROM THE NORTH-WEST . . . facing 21

III. THE OLD TOWN FROM THE SOUTH-WEST IN 1930 . . . . . . facing 36 IV. PART OF OUTER ALNWICK FROM THE SOUTH-WEST IN 1926 . . . . . facing 37

xi

PREFACE

THE study presented in the following pages is an attempt to fill a gap in urban morphology. It is prompted by the problems of how the plan of an old- established town has acquired its geographical complexity, what concepts can be deduced from such an inquiry to help in the analysis of town plans in general, and what contribution the development of a plan makes to the regional structure of a town. In many respects these questions have been but imperfectly answered hitherto, and the deficiency became apparent during a local study of Alnwick and gave rise to this investigation of fundamental aspects.

The author has benefited much from the kindness of various persons who gave him access to relevant material or assisted in other ways. Mr. A. H. Robson, formerly Senior Geography Master at the Duke's School, Alnwick, was most helpful in securing access to important source material. His Grace the Duke of Northumberland kindly permitted perusal of the valuable maps and manorial surveys in the Muniment Room of Alnwick Castle, and Mr. D. Graham's readiness to assist in every way rendered the work of searching profitable and pleasurable. Mr. G. Beaty, Town Surveyor of Alnwick, with unfailing kindness made his local knowledge and the topographical material in his office available. Professor H. J. Fleure made many helpful suggestions, and Professor A. E. Smailes undertook the arduous task of reading the text. The author is especially indebted to Dr. C. I. C. Bosanquet, Rector of King's College, in the University of Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne, whose personal interest in the work has been of the greatest importance. Professor G. H. J. Daysh also gave much encouragement. Special thanks are due to the author's wife whose devotion and patience helped to produce this monograph.

Finally, the author wishes to express his sincere thanks for the financial assistance towards the cost of publication given by the Institute of British Geographers, the Sir James Knott Trust, His Grace the Duke of Northumber- land, Dr. C. I. C. Bosanquet and Mr. William Robertson.

The investigation was carried out with the help of a grant from King's College, in the University of Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PART or the whole of the outlines in Figures 3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19 are based on the Ordnance Survey with the sanction of the Controller of H.M. Stationery Office. Plate I is reproduced by permission of Turners (Photography), Ltd., Newcastle upon Tyne, and Plates II, III and IV by permission of Aero- films and Aero Pictorial, Ltd.

October 1960 M. R. G. C. 1

PART I

PROBLEMS OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

CHAPTER I

THE AIM AND SCOPE IN TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

FUNCTIONALLY the geographical character of a town is determined by economic and social significance within some regional context, no matter whether we are considering a 'central place' with service functions towards a contiguous 'urban field' or a specialized town. Morphologically it finds expression in the physiognomy or townscape, which is a combination of town plan, pattern of building forms, and pattern of urban land use. All these aspects have been the subject of geographical investigation.

The town plan has attracted attention as a subject where the interests of the geographer and others such as historians, archaeologists and town planners converge. In particular it has long been customary to view plans in terms of their development and a broad genealogy of town plans has been recognized. Yet this familiar aspect of urban morphology has remained strangely deficient in its depth of treatment, largely through neglect of significant plan detail, particularly on the part of the geographer whose chorological viewpoint should enable him to make a substantial contribution. Similar criticism applies to other morphological aspects. As a result our geographical comprehension of townscapes is hampered by the lack of a theoretical basis yielding concepts of general application.

The present situation in urban morphology has been the subject of discus- sion recently, and it is sufficient here to reiterate that much geographical work in this field has been unduly influenced in its purpose and treatment by the specific approaches of the architect, the economic historian, and others interested in towns.

Proceeding from this general criticism A. E. Smailes emphasizes the importance of buildings in the townscape and the resulting need for field-work against a preoccupation on the part of some geographers with the study of town maps only. He suggests a method of analysing the townscape by field observa- tion of broad recurrent morphological characteristics susceptible to rapid survey and with some emphasis on buildings. The desire to take stock of the townscape for the purpose of a broad provisional basis for the morphological comparison of towns is understandable. It is also true that much more work needs to be done on urban buildings and the whole urban fabric, though in Europe this criticism applies to research in this country more than on the Continent.2 Yet systematic geographical knowledge of the structure of town plans is far from adequate and its promotion seems quite as necessary as that of other morphological aspects of towns. In the present situation this does call for

3

4 THE AIM AND SCOPE IN TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

some specialization of effort for the purpose of producing the necessary ground- work. Plan, building fabric and land utilization are, of course, interdependent in the geographical reality of the townscape, and their treatment separately can only be a matter of emphasis and not of sharp systematic division. It is possible, however, to claim priority for the town plan on the grounds that it forms the inescapable framework for the other man-made features and provides the physical link between these on the one hand and the physical site as well as the town's past existence on the other.

This study, then, is concerned with geographical analysis of the town plan. By investigating a specific case which promises results of general significance, and by adopting an evolutionary viewpoint, it seeks to establish some basic concepts applicable to recurrent phenomena in urban morphology and to lead to an explanation of the arrangement and diversity of an urban area in terms of plan types and resulting geographical divisions.

A small service centre like Alnwick cannot be expected to show all the phenomena that characterize the morphology of town plans, and no claim to completeness is made in this respect. Nevertheless, its modest size and simple structure make it the more suitable for the establishment of some basic principles and promise to exhibit some morphological phenomena of general significance as well as those peculiar to itself. It may be expected to yield a number of con- cepts applicable beyond the hundreds of small English market towns to English urban settlements in general and to those in other countries.

Some of these cover familiar phenomena, others bring to light new ones. New concepts inevitably involve new terminology and this will be developed as the analysis of Alnwick's plan proceeds. It may also necessitate the redefinition of some familiar but loosely used terms.

In this connection it is fundamental to establish what we mean by a 'town plan'. It is necessary to take a more comprehensive view of this term taking account of relevant geographical detail. In the past many studies of plans have been restricted to the consideration of the streets or street spaces only, a method which has its roots largely in an earlier architectural preoccupation with the contrast between 'voids' and 'solids' and its aesthetic implications. The internal structure of street-blocks has generally been ignored as if this were not geo- graphically relevant. Moreover, a certain crudeness of evolutionary approach took account merely of the broad stages of outward growth and missed the variety of phenomena that they cover, as well as the significant modern changes inside the street-blocks of already established plan components, notably the traditional ones in town centres. In this investigation it is taken as axiomatic that the town plan includes all features of the built-up area shown on the 1/2500 Ordnance Survey Plans.

This comprises the geographical arrangement of the urban built-up area in its full morphological detail and diversity, bringing the plan into intimate rela- tion with the aspects of building fabric and of land use. A town plan can be defined, therefore, as the topographical arrangement of an urban built-up area

THE AIM AND SCOPE IN TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS 5

in all its man-made features. It contains three distinct complexes of plan elements:

(i) streets and their arrangement in a street-system; (ii) plots and their aggregation in street-blocks; and (iii) buildings or, more precisely, their block-plans. The term street here refers to the open space bounded by street-lines and

reserved for the use of surface traffic of whatever kind. The arrangement of these contiguous and interdependent spaces within an urban area, when viewed separately from the other elements of the town plan, may be called the street- system.

The areas within the town plan unoccupied by streets and bounded wholly or in part by street-lines are the street-blocks. Each street-block represents a group of contiguous land parcels or else a single land parcel. Each parcel is essentially a unit of land use; it is physically defined by boundaries on or above ground and may be called a plot, whatever its size. The arrangement of con- tiguous plots is evident from the plot boundaries and, when considered separately from other elements of the town plan, may be called the plot pattern. Figures 5, 7, 8, 15 and 19 show contrasting examples, illustrating that street-blocks can differ widely in their plot patterns, a fact which represents one of their most important geographical characteristics. A row of plots, placed contiguously along the same street-line, each with its own frontage, forms a plot series.

The block-plan of a building is the area occupied by a building and defined on the ground by the lines of its containing walls. It is an essential element of the town plan, loosely referred to as the 'building'.

Examination of the town plan shows that the three element complexes of streets, plots and buildings enter into individualized combinations in different areas of the town. Each combination derives uniqueness from its site cir- cumstances and establishes a measure of morphological homogeneity or unity in some or all respects over its area. It represents a plan-unit, distinct from its neighbours.

Finally, it is important to realize that town plans originate, develop, and function within a physical and human context without which they remain in- comprehensible. Therefore, plan analysis properly includes the evaluation of physical conditions of site and situation as well as of relevant economic and social development. The latter, indeed, provides the background for the inter- dependence of plan, building fabric, and land use, and the bridge between the morphological and the functional approaches in urban geography.

REFERENCES

1 A. E. SMAILES, 'Some reflections on the geographical description and analysis of townscapes', Transactions and Papers, 1955, Institute of British Geographers, 21 (1955), 99-115. A complete list of references used in this study will be found at the end of the book.

2 Cf. W. GEISLER, Die deutsche Stadt (1924) and H. Louis, Die geographische Gliederung von Gross-Berlin (1936), to name only two of the earlier studies. For other references, see R. E. DICKINSON, The West European city (1951), and P. SCHjLLER, 'Aufgaben und Probleme der Stadgeographie', Erdkunde, 7 (1953), 168-9.

B

CHAPTER 2

THE METHOD OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

HAVING defined the purpose of plan analysis and its scope in terms of the town plan, it is necessary to consider the appropriate general approach or method to be followed. Inevitably, this depends on the material object of investigation and its intrinsic nature.

A cursory glance at the arrangement of the built-up area of Alnwick as seen from an aircraft or as represented on the 1/2500 Ordnance map gives a visual experience which can be repeated in the case of the great majority of towns: a pattern of streets, plot boundaries, and buildings of bewildering complexity. Parts of it are shown in Figures 7, 8, 15, 18 and 19, and the whole is summarized in morphological terms in Figure 20. Here and there a dominating theme is evident, expressed perhaps by the street-system, as in the great triangle of streets in the centre of the town, or by the repetition of standard- ized buildings, as in the earlier housing estates. Such local dominance establishes some unity within a very limited area. Its repeated manifestation gives a vague impression of broad similarities between different parts of Alnwick as well as of contrasts such as that between the Old Town and the newer residential districts. On the other hand, irregularity in the arrangement of broad traits as much as of detail, and diversity in the admixture of elements, not only render the built-up area strictly unique but defy explanation from the plan as it stands, even when the site is taken into account.

The reason for this is that a town, like any other object of geographical investigation, is subject to change. Towns have a life history. Their develop- ment, together with the cultural history of the region in which they lie, is written deeply into the outline and fabric of their built-up areas. When one period has achieved the manifestation of its own requirements in the urban pattern of land use, streets, plots and buildings, another supersedes it in turn, and the built-up area, in its functional organization as well as in its townscape, becomes the accumulated record of the town's development.'

In some respects, however, it is an incomplete and confused record since the features created in one period are subjected to change in another in varying degree. The pattern of land use is the most changeable complex, responding relatively quickly to new impulses such as the establishment of a new main road, bridge or railway station and so tending to efface in part at least the land use of previous periods.

In this process, however, the plan and fabric of the town, representing as they do the static investment of past labour and capital, offer great resistance to change. New functions in an older area do not necessarily give rise to new forms. Adaptation rather than replacement of the existing fabric is more likely to occur over the greater part of a built-up area established in a previous period. Old

6

THE METHOD OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS 7

buildings are liable to be replaced by new ones in larger numbers only in the centres of sizeable towns, where economic pressures overcome the obsolescence of inherited forms and lead to replacement on a larger scale. Any new period is likely to be exclusively represented by its own new buildings only in those outer parts that are its contemporary accretions. In the centre the introduction of new forms is usually incomplete and tardy.

If, then, land use and building fabric differ significantly in this respect, the town plan does even more so and is the most conservative morphological complex. Though numerous new buildings may appear in the centre of a town, most of their block-plans conform to their respective plots even if these are centuries old. This is due partly to the closed development of rows on the street-line, the usual building arrangement in central areas, partly to the long- standing concentration of economic activities here. Even where plots have been altered (and few central areas escape this form of change entirely), the plot pattern as a whole is full of residual features from earlier periods and may in fact appear unaltered in all its essential characteristics. The street, however, is the most refractory element of the town plan. New thoroughfares in central areas of the 'Corporation Street' or 'City Road' type are rare and restricted in extent, and changes affecting the street-system are generally confined to the detail of street-lines and even then are slow to appear. In the outer districts of a town, of course, each period is free to add examples of its own type of layout. The older, generally more central, parts of the townscape, then, are subject to changes of varying intensity and morphological aspects within already established plan-units, while the outer areas form successive accretions of new plan-units.

From this comparison of land use, building fabric, and town plan, the last emerges as the complex that contains the fullest record of the town's physical development because it produces the most complete collection of residual features. An evolutionary approach, tracing existing forms back to the under- lying formative processes and interpreting them accordingly, would seem to provide the rational method of analysis.

The processes are those of economic and social development, and this changes in its intensity as well as in its material and spiritual forms, thus allow- ing recognition of distinct cultural periods. Regions vary in the sequence and contents of the cultural periods that affect them, and this holds good for towns. Each period leaves its distinctive material residues in the landscape and for the purpose of geographical analysis can be viewed as a morphological period. In a townscape any particular period expresses itself in the town plan as well as in the fabric of buildings. Generally the newer plan-units in more peripheral situations show homogeneity because of the contemporaneous nature of streets, plots and buildings.

With the exception of the prehistoric and Roman eras, the major morpho- logical periods in the case of Alnwick are those applicable to the rest of England.' However, uncertainties in the earlier topographical and historical evidence, as

8 THE METHOD OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

well as the incidence of modern cartographic sources, make it expedient for the purpose of our analysis to adopt certain contractions and subdivisions as shown in the following table:

The Morphological Periods of Alnwick

(1) Anglian (c. seventh century? - c. 1070) (2) Norman to Early Georgian (c. 1070 - c. 1750) (3) Later Georgian and Early Victorian (c. 1750-1851) (4) Mid- and Late Victorian (1851-1914)

(a) Mid-Victorian (1851-75) (b) Late Victorian (1875-97) (c) Edwardian (1897-1914)

(5) Modern (post-1918) (a) Inter-war (1918-39) (b) Post-war (post-1945)

Alnwick began its existence relatively late in the Anglian period of Northumberland, possibly some time in the seventh century.

The Norman period of Alnwick began after the Wasting of the North in 1069-70," though a Norman castle may not have been built here until the begin- ning of the twelfth century.' The long interval from then until the middle of the eighteenth century comprises more than one cultural epoch, but insufficiencies in the cartographical record of Alnwick make it virtually impossible to sub- divide this long span for morphological purposes, although the origin of five of the eight traditional plan-units of the Old Town can be arranged in a relative time-sequence. Evidence of domestic architecture in the town is very slight and does not allow precise dating, nor do the manorial surveys of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, in spite of the maps contained in that of 1622-24.5 Indeed, when it is first presented in these detailed records, the Old Town appears already complete. In other respects, however, these manorial surveys, kept at Alnwick Castle, are invaluable in providing a bridge of evidence between the growth of the Old Town in the Middle Ages and the appearance of its residual features on the first large-scale plan of the town in the eighteenth century.

It is not until shortly after the middle of the eighteenth century that the cartographical record of Alnwick begins to show significant changes in the town plan. Though small at first, they dominate development during the first half of the nineteenth century, before the arrival of the railway. This allows the years from c. 1750 to 1851 to be distinguished as a separate morphological period. Henceforth new additions to the town plan correspond closely with contemporary architectural house-types, and it is possible to adopt period names of more specific cultural and architectural connotation. The lumping together of 'Later Georgian' and 'Early Victorian' seems justified both because of the homogeneous character and continuity of plan development between 1750 and 1850 and because of the quasi-Georgian character of much of the

THE METHOD OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS 9

Early Victorian building, which reflects a certain time-lag in building fashions reaching the North of England.

The advent of the railway in 1850 marks the beginning of a major new period. In Alnwick this Mid- and Late Victorian period brought intensive congestion in the centre and additional peripheral housing of particular types. By these indices the period lasts until the beginning of the First World War. Certain formative factors in the development of housing, however, enable the whole span from 1850 to 1914 to be subdivided into Mid-Victorian, Late Victorian, and Edwardian periods. They are the Public Health Act of 1875 as well as contemporary Artisans' and Labourers' Dwellings Acts, and the notions of more open development propagated in connection with the garden city idea at the end of the nineteenth century.

The last major period is characterized by similar factors and begins with the end of the First World War. It can be conveniently divided into two minor periods by the hiatus of the Second World War.

Finally, implementation of the evolutionary approach6 depends on the objective of this study and on the nature of the town plan that is being investi- gated. The formative processes underlying areal phenomena must be demon- strated if concepts of general significance are to be produced. This requires the freedom to investigate time-sequence as much as spatial arrangement, particu- larly where successive changes of different character have affected the same area but with varying results, as is the case with the Old Town. Contemporaneity of features more or less widely separated in area within Alnwick's townscape suggests the method of successive geographical cross-sections. So does the fact that the present townscape is the accumulated record of distinct morphological periods. The complexity of the actual plan structure militates against the method of starting from the present and working backwards in explanation of residual features. It seems more rational, therefore, to proceed broadly by cross-sections in time, taking account of the economic and social background of each period,' to emphasize processes where this seems essential for an under- standing of forms, and, finally, to examine the town plan in terms of the develop- ment that has been investigated. The ultimate criterion whether or not such a study is geographical is provided not by its methods but by its purpose: the explanation of the town plan as we find it today.

REFERENCES 1 The development and physical growth of towns is one of the earliest subjects to command the

attention of investigators in urban geography. Cf. H. J. FLEURE, 'Some types of cities in temperate Europe', Geographical Review, 10 (1920), 357-74; 'City morphology in Europe', Proceedings of the Royal Institution of Great Britain, 27 (1931); and 'The historic city in western and Central Europe', Bulletin of John Rylands Library, Manchester, 20 (1936). H. D6RRIES, 'Der gegenwartige Stand der Stadtgeographie', Petermanns Mitteilungen Erg. H., 209 (1930), 315-18, 320-1. R. E. DICKINSON, op. cit., 279-509, 559-64. M. SORRE, Fondements de la gdographie humaine, iii (1952), 214-17. A. E. SMAILES, The geography of towns (1953), 7-40, 68-134, 157-60. P. SCHiLLER, op. cit., 162-6.

2 Cf. S. W. WOOLDRIDGE and W. G. EAST, The spirit andpurpose of geography (1951), 88.

10 THE METHOD OF TOWN-PLAN ANALYSIS

3 Cf. W. S. ANGUS, 'Anglo-Saxon and medieval settlement', Scientific survey of North-eastern

England (1949), 72. 4 G. TATE, The History of the Borough, Castle and Barony of Alnwick, vol. i (1866), 51.

5 For a chronological list of topographical sources, cf. the list of 'Alnwick (maps and surveys)' on pp. 121-2.

6 Cf. R. HARTSHORNE, The nature of geography (3rd ed. 1949), xxxiv-ix, 175-88. H. C. DARBY, 'On the relations of geography and history', Transactions and Papers, 1953, Institute of British

Geographers, 19 (1953), 1-11. 7 Cf. for this aspect G. M. TREVELYAN, English social history (1944).

PART II

THE GROWTH OF ALNWICK'S BUILT-UP AREA

CHAPTER 3

THE GENERAL PATTERN OF GROWTH

BEFORE investigating the detail of plan development in the different morpho- logical periods, a brief introduction to the broad pattern of growth will be help- ful (Fig. 1). The heavy symbols that denote plan-units originating in various periods before 1620 form a contiguous and relatively compact area. This covers

ALNW ICK -GROWTH OF BUILT-UP AREA ANGUAN

ROUTEWAYS DEVELOPMENT ON THE CENTRAL TRIANGLE

CONJECTURED ANCLIAN NUCLEUS OTHER ROADS If DEVELOPMENT TO 1620

A l MEDIEVAL CASTLE , BAILIFFCATE --

ROADS b

DEVELOPMENT 1b20

TO 1774

- EARLIER MEDIEVAL BOROUGH DO*

O

1775 TO 1851I

SMEDIEVAL BOROUGH EXTENSION O D 1852 TO 1897

0 D" REVERTING

TO OPEN LAND LATER D 898 TO 918 00 0000 0 d.0 Da 1898 TO 1918

SALNW CK ABBEY

C, CANONCATE D 1919 TO 1939

DIP REVERIING TO OPEN LAND LATER Do 1q40 TO I95b

r, nAREA OF EARLIER MEDIEVAL BOROUGH 1 REVERTING TO

d ADJOINING

DEVELOPMENT TO 1620

OPEN LAND LATER

1/-; -

Af2 . '.

' :. ,J

-? 7-

. . ,- -,',_

0.0%l

:::" " ,,,.•!: ! ~

o II Ne V_ _ _

0 0

0 So 100 500 200 Ir

1/ _____ ______________ _____

FIGURE 1

the centre of Alnwick and reaches northward nearly as far as the river Aln. From it two short, squat prongs project along the south-eastern and south- western arterial roads. The whole of this area forms the kernel or Old Town," its plan dominated by traditional features, and notably by the long-established street-system. Being a composite kernel, it is made up of no less than nine differ- ent major plan-units. Six of them are certainly medieval in origin, and one of

11

12 THE GENERAL PATTERN OF GROWTH

them contains the conjectured Anglian nucleus. The other three, i.e. the two southern arterial prongs and the development on the Central Triangle, may have originated in the Middle Ages and were certainly established by 1620.

Additions to the Old Town form the Accretions,2 their plan-units dominated by non-traditional features. They are arranged as a very irregular, broad, and in many places discontinuous zone round the kernel on its west, south and east sides, but not on the north-west, north and north-east. This broad belt is traversed on all sides by distinctly older roads that radiate from the Old Town and its arterials.

Within these accretions the development between 1620 and 1851 occupies an equally broken and irregular inner zone. Its various more or less distinct areas are all associated either with old arterial roads and field lanes or with the ring road that surrounds much of the Old Town, separating the latter from the remainder of the Outer Accretions.

The development between 1852 and 1918 has been largely confined to the south and east, its individual blocks of land tending to form rather larger units than those of previous accretions and lying in groups more isolated from each other. Again they are in contact with old roads, though in one case on the south-east side between Wagonway Road and South Road a unit has generated its own contemporaneous street-system.3

The accretions belonging to the period from 1919 to 1956 form an outer zone, still more discontinuous than those of the previous period, but now represented on the west side of the town. Individual units tend to be very large and form two markedly concentrated groups, one in the west about Howling Lane and the other to the south and south-east of Swansfield Park Road. The tendency to be patterned with contemporaneous internal roads is strong in the units of this period except where they have incorporated older roads.

This general picture of growth already shows some broad dissimilarities between the various parts of Alnwick's built-up area. They are matched by important structural differences and, together with these, will form the subject of investigation in the following chapters.

REFERENCES

1 Cf. SMAILES, op. cit., 108-12. 2 Cf. SMAILES, op. cit., 92, 113, 125. For a further discussion of the Old Town and its accretions,

cf. Chapter 6, pp. 52-6. 3 Figure 3, of the site of modern Alnwick, contains a street-plan and some additional topo-

graphical names.

CHAPTER 4

ANGLIAN ALNWICK

Situation and Anglian Roads

THE name Alnwick puts the origin of a settlement on the site into a fairly late stage of Anglian colonization, perhaps after A.D. 600. The other place-names of mid-Northumberland and the evidence of local history give a clue to Alnwick's situation and relative importance at that time (Fig. 2).1

Earlier, Lesbury seems to have been the major settlement in the lower basin of the Aln, and as late as the twelfth century Alnwick and Denwick were both ecclesiastically dependent upon Lesbury.2 Trackways of minor importance will have connected the last place with the -ingham villages in the upper basin of the Aln before Alnwick and Denwick were founded in the intermediate stretch of wild country. It is possible that the forking of these roads and the layout of the original Anglian village at Alnwick are discernible in the present town plan, although the establishment of the great Norman castle and changes in the system of major routeways probably interfered with such earlier features.

The single trackway from Lesbury could reach the Alnwick area on the line of the present Alnmouth Road using the dry stretches of sandy glacial drift. Instead of continuing along the tract of similar sands at Denwick, it could cross the Aln half-way at a convenient point in a more open stretch of the valley. The antiquity of this road is suggested by its appearance as a main road on Mayson's Map of 16223 with much the same alignment as today. On geo- logical grounds the most likely place for its major fork would be the present town centre because it is about this locality that the rock outcrops that form the Alnwick Ridge come nearest to the Alnwick sheet of sandy drift (Fig. 3).4 This enabled the three westward branches to Eglingham, Whittingham and Edling- ham to reach their separate objectives by following the firm dry ground of solid rocks and glacial sands.

The route north-west to Eglingham could traverse the sands at Alnwick and farther north-west the Fell Sandstone on the flanks of Brizlee Hill. The routes to Whittingham and Edlingham could jointly use the Alnwick Ridge in a south-westward direction, forking only where the solid outcrop gave way to the boulder clay of Alnwick Moor. Indeed, all three routes are shown on Mayson's Moor Map of 1622 as main roads in corresponding position. The road from Eglingham approached Alnwick by Bassington, East Brizlee, Stony Peth and Ratten Row on the north-west side of the town. It appears as the only highway to Eglingham on Armstrong's Map of Northumberland of 1769 and as late as 1824 existed as a 'bridle road'- before the extension and re-design of Hulne Park had obliterated this ancient right of way altogether. The combined route from Whittingham and Edlingham approached Clayport Bank on the south-west side

13

14 ANGLIAN ALNWICK

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FIGURE 2

ANGLIAN ALNWICK 15

of the town across the Moor past the old quarries, being then sited much nearer the crest of the Alnwick Ridge than the present Rothbury Road.

The junction of these roads with the ancient route from Lesbury may be detected in the plan of central Alnwick. No one looking at the latter can fail to be impressed by the broad and simple theme of this road fork, with Bondgate pointing to the north-west and Market Street /Clayport Street to the south-west. In approaching this fork by the line of the present South Road and Bondgate, the road from Lesbury could keep to the ledge of relatively level ground about and just below the 200-foot contour. This provided convenient crossings of the five drainage lines on the north-east slope of the Alnwick Ridge from the Aller Burn in the east to the Wash Burn or Canongate Burn in the west. It allowed the Anglian route to Eglingham to continue via Bondgate and the south-east stretch of Narrowgate.

Beyond the Bow Burn the Anglian road system clearly appears to have been disrupted by great changes that followed the building of the Norman castle, the construction of the Great North Road, and the successive enclosures of Hulne Park centuries later. Yet the road fork of central Alnwick is there to suggest that the Anglian route to Eglingham did continue north-west immed- iately beyond the Bow Burn. Here a ledge of level ground has the same relation to the supposed Anglian routeway as two similar features in Bondgate (Fig. 4).6 The next objective of the Eglingham road would be the line of Ratten Row. There is definite evidence that considerable changes have taken place before 1567 in the street-block between Bailiffgate and Pottergate. In Clarkson's Survey of that year, the traditional holdings or burgages occupying the west side of Narrowgate just north of Pottergate are all reported in a contemporary marginal note as having in ancient times formed one common way to the church enabling strangers to come into Alnwick town by Walkergate and past the church, thus avoiding entry into Bailiffgate which was not part of the town but under the direct administration of the castle.' The northern holding in fact was still recorded as the 'churchwaye' enclosed by the building of the late medieval town-wall between Narrowgate and the present Northumberland Street. The same holding appears in the Northumberland Survey of 1586 as 'a toft late a Comon way called the Church way als Alyene Lane'.8 Mayson's Survey of 1622-24 has an identical entry. Its map shows the unenclosed remnants of the old road traversing the street-block half-way between the corner of Bailiffgate and the present Northumberland Street in the direction of the Bow Burn cross- ing in Narrowgate (Fig. 5 and outlines of 1620 in Fig. 9). On Wilkin's Map of 1774 this vestigial feature is shortened, but is none the less evident. In addition Mayson's Map, while representing the south side of Bailiffgate and the north side of Pottergate as fully built-up, shows no houses on the intermediate stretch of Narrowgate. The east end of Ratten Row has a trumpet-shaped widening, as if to indicate a large wayside waste or an ancient drove road. The position and configuration of a close (Salisbury Lands) immediately to the east, occupying the ground between the top of Canongate and the present vicarage, is such as to

16 ANGLIAN ALNWICK

suggest that this parcel had been taken from the road or roadside waste. The abrupt change of direction shown by Narrowgate at the Bow Burn crossing appears to be a later feature. On the other side Pottergate (earlier Barresdale Street) seems always to have formed a purely local road giving access to Howling Lane and the adjoining fields of Barresdale.9 The cartographic evidence in Mayson's Survey supports this, and the configuration of the land in and west of Pottergate also suggests that any road with a more distant aim would go round the northern flank rather than directly over the hill ('Watts knowe' = Watch Know, Lookout Hill; Figs. 3 and 9). All this evidence points to the Anglian routeway running north-westward from the Bow Burn, joining the present line of Ratten Row, and continuing along the Stony Peth in Hulne Park.

The combined line of the Anglian routes to Edlingham and Whittingham forked from the Eglingham road in Bondgate and ran along Market Street, thereby avoiding the steep rise immediately to the south. It continued via Clayport Street to Clayport Bank and so across Alnwick Moor (Figs. 3 and 4). The smooth informal outline and the width of Market Street, Clayport Street and Clayport Bank certainly suggest a feature of great antiquity in the town plan, again faithfully portrayed on Mayson's Map. On Mayson's Moor Map the ancient road is shown continuing south-westward by ascending the Alnwick Ridge past St. Thomas's Farm and via Bank Top.

From this discussion the great road fork in the centre of Alnwick with its eastward trunk and its two diverging branches westward emerges as the most ancient feature of the present town plan and as one probably older than the Anglian vill. As such it represents an inherited outline.

Site and Settlement Form

In the absence of both historical and archaeological evidence, the location of the Anglian vill presents a tantalizing problem, and the topographical evi- dence is sufficiently ambiguous to admit of at least two different hypotheses.

The site of the earlier village is broadly but not closely circumscribed by geology and relief on the south bank of the Aln (Figs. 2 and 3). Here the Aln- wick sheet of fairly thick sandy drift overlies the boulder clay, giving a site of a type commonly favoured by Anglo-Saxon settlers as it meant easier clearing, well-drained building ground, and the certainty of local water supply.

A possible site for the original village might be one close to the church on the broad spur of relatively level land now occupied by Bailiffgate and including perhaps the area of the present castle, for the case of a Norman castle displacing parts of an earlier settlement is not uncommon (Fig. 4). In 1147, the date of its first mention, the present parish church at the western end of Bailiffgate was the 'capella de Alnewic', belonging to Lesbury church and, like this, forming part of the endowment of the newly founded Alnwick Abbey across the river.1o It may or may not occupy the site of its Anglian predecessor. At all events its site is completely contiguous to the territory belonging to Bailiffgate which right up to

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ANGLIAN ALNWICK 17

the early nineteenth century was under the direct jurisdiction of the castle and so quite distinct from the walled town and its fields. In all the manorial surveys of Alnwick it included the Salisbury Lands and the adjacent parts of Ratten Row, thus separating the church and churchyard completely from the borough. If the original village occupied the site of Bailiffgate it would lie at the northern edge of the sandy drift, fully conforming to its Anglian name but lying rather excentrically and less conveniently in relation to its ancient open fields. These, to judge by the field-names on Mayson's Map, occupied largely the lighter soils of the sandy drift but overlapped the boulder clay and sandstones to the east and south-west (Fig. 3).

However, the area about the present market-place offers another solution (Fig. 1). Though this alternative separates the site from the church and does not give us quite so clearly a 'wic by the Aln', it is supported by a number of consider- ations. We have seen that the original village probably belongs to the latest ex- pansion phase of Anglian settlement. W. Page showed long ago that whereas the villages of the early Anglo-Saxon period had no intimate association with any roads, those of the expansion phase during the later Anglo-Saxon and Danish period often evinced such close relation in the very structure of their layouts. This might be simply that of a street lined with homesteads on either side or otherwise influenced directly by existing road outlines." It implies that with the gradual consolidation of political and economic life in Anglo-Saxon England the earlier hazards of a roadside location were increasingly offset by its economic advan- tages. Siting within the road fork in the case of Alnwick would accord well with this view. Moreover, it would offer a relatively level site in otherwise fairly strong relief, as spacious as that at Bailiffgate, and more conveniently supplied with water. It would also be better placed in relation to the whole of its open- field system.

On balance, the ancient road fork appears to be the more likely site. But wherever its initial site lay, it is tempting to speculate on the actual layout of the vill and to compare it with the traditional village forms of North-east England. The broadened street of Bailiffgate and the great, almost equilateral triangle formed in the centre of the ancient road fork by the addition of Fenkle Street suggest two variants of what was probably once the most common type: the green-village.12 This type has been the subject of investiga- tion by H. Thorpe, who comes to no firm conclusion on its origins.'1 The evidence is indeed perplexing. Green-villages are regularly associated with Anglo-Saxon place-names, and some of the morphological sub-types such as the large, squat triangular greens look archaic in shape. But 'street-greens', as at Trimdon (Co. Durham), are strikingly similar to the highly organized green- villages of the East German colonization of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One cannot help suspecting that, in view of the great variety of observable forms, the comprehensive term 'green-village' combines types of very different origin even within this country. If the present form of Bailiffgate was not to be regarded as the product of post-Anglian changes it might be interpreted as

18 ANGLIAN ALNWICK

preserving the shape of a narrow street-green. It is more likely that the triangle formed by Bondgate, Market Street and Fenkle Street was an early green- village, i.e. one grafted on to the pre-existing routeway junction. In layout and name Fenkle ('angle')'" Street appears as an addition to the original fork, albeit an early one. That the whole of this triangle, to be called the Central Triangle in this study, must have been originally one open space and that the small street- blocks within it are a more recent development will be shown later. On this central site, then, it appears likely that there was once a green-village with a fairly large triangular green of somewhat archaic outline traversed in its southern part by a watercourse that appears on plans as late as 1726 and 1850.6 Like many similar green-villages in Northumberland it suited a pastoral economy needing protection for its stock at night, originally from wild beasts and later from border raiders. Conveniently situated on a routeway junction, such a community may have needed only a slight stimulus to develop into something more than a peasant village.

REFERENCES ' A. MAWER, The place-names of Northumberland and Durham (1920), 5: Alnwick = homestead

or wic (dwelling-place, village) by the Aln. S. W. WOOLDRIDGE, 'The Anglo-Saxon settlement', Figure 16 and p. 120, in H. C. DARBY, An historical geography of England before A.D. 1800 (1936). R. G. COLLINGWOOD & J. N. L. MYRES, Roman Britain and the English settlements (1936), 420. F. M. STENTON, Anglo-Saxon England (1947), 74, 76. NORTHUMBERLAND COUNTY HISTORY COMMITTEE, History of Northumberland, vol. vii (1904), 14; vol. xiv (1935), 361-483.

2 MAWER, op. cit., 133-4: Lesbury = Leech's burh or fortified place. History of Northumberland, vol. ii (1895), 438-9. TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 38.

3 This, together with Mayson's Moor Map in The exemplification of Mayson's Survey, 1622-24. Cf. the references on p. 121.

4 In Figure 3, the contours are those of the 1/25,000 O.S. provisional edition, sheets 46/11 and 46/21. The geology shown is that of the 6-inch Geological Survey of England and Wales, Northumber- land N.S. sheet N XXXV. N.W. For the geology of the Alnwick area cf. also CARRUTHERS and others, The geology of the Alnwick district, Memoir of the Geological Survey of England and Wales, sheet 6 (1930) 98-9. T. S. WESTOLL, D. A. ROBSON & R. GREEN, A guide to the geology of the district around Alnwick (1955).

5 A map of a projected turnpike road from Haggerston blacksmith's shop to Alnwick, etc. by N. WEATHERLY, surveyor (1824).

6 In Figure 4, the 25-foot contours are those of the 1/25,000 0.S. provisional edition, sheets 46/11. The 5-foot contours have been obtained by interpolation from the spot levels of the 10- foot (1/528) O.S. series of Alnwick (1866), sheets 1-8, adjusted as far as possible to current O.D. and by field observation. The reconstruction of old watercourses is based on perusal of the following maps: Map of part of the Town of Alnwick, 1726; A plan of the Town and the Castle of Alnwick, etc. by I. THOMPSON, 1760; Plan of the Town and Castle of Alnwick by TH. WILKIN, 1774; Plan of the water course which supplies Alnwick Castle with water by TH. WILKIN, 1785; Ground plan and profile of levels, etc. by R. TATE, 1815; and a map of Alnwick showing lines of drainage, in R. RAWLINSON, Report to the General Board of Health, 1850.

7 Clarkson's Survey, 1567, fol. 43. 8 Survey of Northumberland, 1586, fol. 26. 9 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii (1868-9), 366, 370-1. 10 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 105. 1x W. PAGE, 'The origin and forms of Hertfordshire towns and villages', Archaeologia, 69 (1917-

18), 49.

ANGLIAN ALNWICK 19 12 M. R. G. CONZEN, 'Modern settlement' in Scientific survey of North-eastern England (1949),

77-8, and separate distribution map. 13 H. THORPE, 'The green villages of County Durham', Transactions and Papers, 1949, Institute of

British Geographers, 15 (1949), 179-80; 'Some aspects of rural settlement in County Durham', Geography, 35 (1950), 250.

14 R. O. HESLOP, Northumberland words (1892), vol. i, 281; J. WRIGHT, The English dialect diction- ary (n.d.), vol. ii, 334; TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 366.

CHAPTER 5

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

Situation and Site

IN North-east England the Norman Conquest meant a considerable reorienta- tion in regional relations. Anglian Northumberland had been the heart of the Bernician kingdom with its early capital at Bamburgh, but its different parts, even with such improvement in land communications as the later Anglian period achieved, must have enjoyed complete economic and a considerable measure of administrative autonomy. Norman Northumberland on the other hand was the border march of a very much larger kingdom with its centre in the distant south, and lay on a continually contested frontier. The elaborate mechanism of military defence so characteristic of the highly organized Norman r6gime was superimposed on Anglian Northumberland and gave it new strategic lines like the Great North Road capable of carrying elaborate armies with their trains, and a system of great border castles securing those lines. The distance of Northumberland from the south necessitated the delegation of military power from king to chief vassal and so gave it border barons and some peculiarities of social and political life that are reflected in its settlement geography.

Alnwick, situated midway between Newcastle and Berwick on the great lowland routeway of Northumberland where it crosses one of the transverse river lines, was fully affected by these changes and rapidly became a major point in the strategic defence system of the Border. As an important resting point on the new strategic line of the Great North Road, it combined an excel- lent regional situation with a suitable site for a fortress at the north-eastern end of the Alnwick Ridge. Here the long northward slope of the ridge is interrupted conveniently by a ledge of more level ground at and above 180 feet, and is also dissected by five streams so as to form a series of spurs (Fig. 4). Among these, that formed by the erosion of the Bow Burn offered all the advantages needed for the siting of an important castle. Relatively level on top, it was bounded by steep slopes on three sides and lay sufficiently near the river to bring the crossing point of the great highway within the range of fire from the new fortress. During the Middle Ages and until 1770 the only medieval bridge stood some thirty yards downstream from the present Lion Bridge and so a little nearer to the castle (Figs. 1 and 5).1 The new Great North Road was made to climb the northward slope of the spur as a steep approach road (Northumbrian 'peth'2), steep enough to break the force of the enemy's onrush but not too steep for the freight transport of those days. In addition, the existence of an agricultural community in the immediate neighbourhood, if of no decisive advantage, must at least have been convenient for the castle garrison.

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MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 21

Alnwick Castle

The Norman castle ante-dated the medieval borough of Alnwick, though not, of course, the Anglian village, and in that sense only can it be regarded as Alnwick's pre-urban nucleus. Structural evidence indicates that the Norman Castle already had much the same general outline as the present one with its keep and two baileys, except that the keep then abutted north directly on the outside ground (Fig. 5).3 It was one of the largest Norman castles of the Border and the natural advantages of its site were enhanced by artificial earthworks, especially at the east end, to accommodate so large a structure and give it an unassailable perimeter. But the general shape of the castle layout conforms roughly with the wedge shape of the spur on which it was placed. From the broad base of its west wall, which dominated the nearby highway and contained the main gate ultimately secured by a strong barbican, the layout tapered to- wards its apex in the Ravine Tower (Records Tower) at the east end of the spur. As the head of a barony it doubtless housed a relatively large population with administrative and domestic functions. But it must also have had a large garri- son, at least when it was built by the Vescis in the late eleventh or early twelfth century and was then known as a munitissimum castellum, or again when it was almost completely rebuilt by Henry de Percy in the early fourteenth century. About that time the constable of Alnwick Castle had to maintain a regular garrison of 40 men-at-arms and 40 hobblers (light cavalry men), though in 1315 the castle garrison amounted to over 3000 men-at-arms besides the hobblers.4 In spite of its structural changes in modern times Alnwick Castle remains today as one of the two most impressive historic features in the existing plan of the town (Fig. 18).

Bailiffgate In times of actual warfare, when the castle became the rallying point for the

feudal armies from the territory of the barony, the number of soldiery assembled here would be considerably greater than could be accommodated in the castle. The same applied on occasions when retainers and tenants of the barony attended the baronial court. Extra quarters had then to be found near the castle gate, and there is historical evidence to show that they were in Bailiffgate. Clarkson's Survey not only states this in general but lists two groups of holdings within Bailiffgate that had once formed the lodgings of some of the larger retainers when rendering service at the castle (Fig. 5).5 One of them, known as 'in auncyent tyme mydletons lodginges', comprised three holdings at the east end of Bailiffgate (M in Fig. 5). The other group consisted of four holdings (tenementa) known as 'hiltones lodginges' that occupied the western half of Bailiffgate north side (H in Fig. 5). The occurrence of these 'lodgings' in two different parts of Bailiffgate suggests that in the Middle Ages this street was largely, if not wholly, occupied by militia or by people assembled for adminis- trative purposes. It is significant that in the same survey none of these holdings

C

22 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

paid any rents to the town reeve (praepositus burgi). Further, all the other ancient holdings within the Bailiffgate area also carried the designation tene- mentum in contrast to the normal burgage (burgagium) of the town and paid their rents to the castle reeve (praepositus castri), thereby emphasizing the separateness of Bailiffgate from the town previously mentioned.

Thus, the evidence suggests that Bailiffgate was a settlement separate from the town, closely related to the castle and its military and administrative func- tions, and under the immediate jurisdiction of the baron or his ministerial. The nearby parish church, besides forming a protective feature on its spur site at the west end of Bailiffgate, as did the castle on a grander scale at its east end, may have had closer connections with this military settlement if its dedication to St. Michael can be taken as an indication. All this agrees with the statements of G. Tate, who explains the name Bailiffgate (pronounced 'Belleygate') as meaning 'bailey-gate', indicating a kind of additional bailey to the castle which together with Ratten Row was used as a training ground for the hobblers. It is not contradicted by the earlier cartographic and the topographical evidence.6 On Mayson's Map the area of northern Narrowgate, although divided into strip- shaped plots, has no buildings and so lets Bailiffgate appear as a separate nucleus. This may indicate no more than an incidental state as the result of a fire or even a border raid some fifty or sixty years earlier, since the plots occupy- ing the site of Hilton's Lodgings in Bailiffgate and some other street frontages in Alnwick, which one might have expected to be built up, are also shown void of buildings. The present topographical evidence clearly presents a broad street widening towards the castle gate with row development on either side and a pattern of fairly short strip-plots behind each street front. As with the very different strip-plots of central Alnwick analysed later, the present Bailiffgate plots are without doubt identifiable as the holdings (tenementa) listed in Clark- son's Survey, 1567, and are more than likely to represent medieval units of land tenure. Tate's statement that in the eighteenth century a cross stood in the Castle Square at the east end of Bailiffgate and that a market for country produce was held there, may indicate a survival of medieval market activities.7

Practically all the features discussed here in connection with the Bailiffgate settlement show affinities to the medieval suburbium of feudal Europe, that early type of unwalled settlement under the gate of a fortress (sub urbe) or other pre-urban nucleus." This supports the suggestion that in its general features the present layout of Bailiffgate may be Norman rather than a residual plan element from Anglian times. If so, it was cleverly sited on fairly level ground near the castle, and in direct communication with two routeways. The older of these came from Eglingham, the new Barony of Wooler, and the Tweed frontier at Wark and Norham. The new one came from Berwick, went past the castle gate, and, after a stagger in front of it (probably a later feature occasioned by the need to find room for additional plots on the east side of Narrowgate and Bailiffgate), went down the slope to join the old route from Edlingham at the Bow Burn crossing. Today the layout of Bailiffgate, with its broad street space and its two

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 23

series of tenement plots, survives with relatively fewer changes than those of any other medieval plan-unit in the town.

The Economic Development of the Manorial Borough As stated above, the creation of the Borough of Alnwick seems unlikely to

have broken the topographical continuity of development on the site. The first known charter, granted by William de Vesci, Lord of the Barony of Alnwick, to 'my burgesses of Alnewic' some time between 1157 and 1185 is brief and gives no hint of the institution of a new site or layout for the town, and the same applies to subsequent charters.9 It is thus very doubtful whether the former Anglian vill was at all extensively refashioned when raised to the status of what was after all only a manorial borough. More likely, it grew gradually into a town once the Norman castle had been built there as the seat of one of the great Border baronies in the north.

We have seen that the Central Triangle of Alnwick suggests both the site as well as the form of the earlier village. If this view is correct, such original plan could be adapted to its new function as an inherited outline without any changes. The villeins of the former village could become burgesses on the spot, their tofts and crofts becoming burgages. Indeed, if those green-villages of North-east England which at some time or other in the Middle Ages functioned as markets could be proved to have received their present layout in Anglian days, they would provide many parallel cases.

The historical evidence collected by Tate shows that the advantages of Alnwick's situation soon proved to be economic as well as strategic, in spite of the hazards of border warfare which more than once resulted in the destruction of the town. The presence of the castle would tend to stimulate economic activities beyond those of a mere peasant community. Not that the medieval town was ever divorced from agriculture. Two inquisitions of 1289 reveal the presence of twenty 'bondmen' in Alnwick, i.e. peasants holding their land on bondage tenure, and according to Tate giving Bondgate its name.'0 Further, there were seven cotmen, and the free tenants and burgesses also engaged in farming. Moreover, the large castle as well as the attached Bailiffgate suburbium must early have attracted craftsmen who would find there a ready market for their products and services. In view of the special functions of Bailiffgate most of them were probably established round the triangular green of the ancient road junction, which gave more room for the development of a market than Bailiffgate, with its military activities. The lord of the manor from whom the inhabitants received their right of burgage tenure in the twelfth century probably encouraged this geographical separation of functions as he stood to gain by it administratively and financially. Unfortunately, the gradual process by which the earlier settlement grew into a town is virtually unrecorded, but its results by the end of the thirteenth century and in the first half of the fourteenth century are clear enough. The mention of two wine-merchants in 1181 reflects the

24 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

process of specialization in trading. About a hundred years later, reference to a fuller or walker in a deed of conveyance, and the mention of a forge or iron foundry, would seem to indicate an increasing variety of industries, and in a judicial inquiry at the same time the market and fair are mentioned as institu- tions of 'immemorial usage'."

In the meantime, William de Vesci's charter had granted the right of bur- gage tenure to the people of Alnwick in accordance with the customs of New- castle, and subsequent charters of the thirteenth century confirmed the liberties of the manorial borough and added to the corporate property and privileges of the burgesses. Finally, grants usually forming part of the royal prerogative were given: the market and fair were confirmed by Edward I to the lord of the manor in 1297, and pontage (bridge tolls) was granted by Edward III to the burgesses in 1377.12 This last charter suggests a considerable volume of trade as the tolls specified in it are assumed to yield sufficient income in the space of three years to cover the cost of repairing the bridge extensively and of paving the streets. By giving a detailed specification of tolls, it also demonstrates the great variety of commodities coming into and out of Alnwick. They included corn, livestock, skins, textiles, a variety of raw materials, especially those used in tanning and dyeing, timber and other constructional materials, and a great variety of provisions and miscellaneous merchandise. It is apparent that the division of labour in industrial production within the medieval system of craft gilds was well represented at Alnwick, though detailed records of the gilds exist only for the Tudor period and later. Moreover, the trade of the town with more distant areas was considerable and reflected the economic character of the region. Corn and other provisions were generally imported, and the produce of cattle rearing, notably skins and hides, formed the chief export trade, much of which was already leaving through the port of Alnmouth. The ancient road to Lesbury thus came to be known as the Alnmouth Road.'"

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries information from the gild records of the borough is more extensive. The trade of the town was then considerable, and among the ten incorporated companies that of the merchants was the most important. Tanning, the chief industry in Alnwick, was based on a major local product and by the mid-seventeenth century there were no less than twenty-two tanneries in the town.

For all the variety of economic activities, the town was small by modern standards and grew only slowly until the Agricultural Revolution and the improvement of transport effected some change in the surrounding countryside. Although the town's population about 1550 is estimated to have been little more than two thousand it was an important regional centre, as was reflected in its social life, and many of the country gentry of the district had town-houses in Alnwick and frequently resided there.'1

From this picture of economic development and from the general circum- stances of its position in the Border Marches it may be concluded that topo- graphically the medieval and early modern borough of Alnwick experienced a

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 25

slow and moderate growth from a nucleus which was already fairly liberally laid out at the outset.

The Town Plan of the Early Manorial Borough The extent and nature of the medieval plan and its development form an

interesting subject for cartographical analysis since the nucleus, though still recognizable in the present townscape as a major residual feature of the Middle Ages, has not remained unaffected by subsequent changes. Essential tools in such an investigation, apart from the Ordnance Survey Plans, are Wilkin's Map of 1774 and the manorial and borough surveys from Clarkson's Survey of 1567 to that of 1774. They establish a link with medieval times by allowing a correlation of the present property boundaries with the units of land tenure in the Tudor period. In a town like Alnwick, the majority of these may at least be regarded as preserving the medieval pattern in modified form, even if they do not go back to the Middle Ages in every detail. In all the surveys these units are known individually as burgage (burgagium), i.e. the urban plot held by a burgess. It contained his house, yard and 'garth', and was charged with a fixed rent as a contribution to the communal borough tax or firma burgi of the town, as the first borough entry in Clarkson's Survey expressly states.'"

The topographical development of existing plots can be traced as far back as 1851 with the aid of the various large-scale plans of the Ordnance Survey. Thus a direct correlation is possible between the modern plot boundaries and the burgage boundaries of 1774, thanks to the large scale and careful execution of Wilkin's Map, Wood's Map of 1827 providing a useful intermediate check. This takes the analysis back to a time when the predominant forms of inter- ference with the shapes and sizes of the anciently established burgage units had been those of the amalgamation of neighbouring burgages, or the mediation, i.e. halving of a burgage into two moieties, or occasionally even a quartering. From 1774 backwards the various borough surveys allow a correlation of the burgages of 1774 with those of 1567 by the threefold check of holder's names, rentals and the topographical sequence employed in the recording of the different surveys. In addition Mayson's Survey has his map of Alnwick and gives the areas of all holdings, though this check is not always easy to apply as the areas are given 'by estimacion' and in any case have no constant quantitative relation to the more important frontages. Nevertheless, save for recognizable instances of amalgamation and mediation, there is remarkable continuity in the identity of the overwhelming majority of burgages as ownership units revealed by this evidence stretching over more than 200 years. It makes the assumption that, in its general features, the burgage pattern of 1567 inside the walled town is essentially that of the Middle Ages more reasonable than it might otherwise appear.

By plotting the burgage boundaries of 1774 on a modern plan, those that still form elements of the existing townscape can be distinguished from those that

26 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

THE SITE OF OLD ALNWICK 25-FT. CONTOURS A ALLER BURN

5-FT. CONTOURS B BOW BURN

FORMER RIVER ALN C WASH (CANONG.) BURN

--- STREAM COURSES G GREENWELL

ANGLIAN ROUTEWAYS I CASTLE 10 KING'S ARMS YARD 2 ST. MICHAEL'S CH. II MONKHOUSE TERRACE 3 STONE WELL 12 POTTERGATE PLACE 4 ST. MICHAEL'S PANT 13 QUEEN'S HEAD YARD 5 BARNDALE COTTAGE 14 ROXBRO PLACE 6 CHAPEL LANE 15 THREE TUNS YARD 7 CORRECTION HO. LA. 16 WAGONWAY ROAD 8 DODD'S LANE 17 WHITE HART YARD 9 HOTSPUR STREET

SCALE OF FEET

0 500 1000

TON0.

E......

r 4

..............

FIGURE 4

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 27

MEDIEVAL ALNWICK SITE OF LATE MEDIEVAL TOWN-WALL:

E REPRESENTED BY EXISTING BOUNDARIES

/rt .m

NOT SO REPRESENTED

/ I,,

ANCIENT BURGAGE BOUNDARIES:

S I

- - RESIDUAL OBLITERATED

Z ......... CONJECTURAL BOUNDARIES 1 IsI. WITHIN CENTRAL TRIANGLE

II / I TENEMENT BOUNDARIES IN BAILIFFGATE:

I I I RESIDUAL OBLITERATED

I I, ,

/ /I j;

/ FEUDATORY LODGINGS 1

I

K• "

IMENTIONED 1N

1567

?" AL.NW.

C CAPE' . N

IB BON.ATE

TOWER T •

M I I IDDLETON'S

GATE TOWER 0\ \ X POTTERGATE TOWER I

ON MAYSON'S MAP,1622 ,,-

POTTERGATE TOWER

,

'

'-"

'

(REBUILT IN 1767) I

00-

S STONE WELL / I i t SL SALISBURY LANDS

"-

X CONFLUENCE OF

...A.T 8OW BURN TRIBUTARIES

- *t****

ROADS AND CLOSES ON WEST SIDE OF BAILIFFGATE SCALE OF FEET

, CONJECTURAL ANGLIAN ROUTE TO EGLINGHAM I I

A? !p-

SL f/ T)D44E

=. ~ ~ . ~?c1 *

FIGURE 5

28 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

have vanished. Previous amalgamations and divisions that appear from a comparison of the different surveys can be allowed for to come as near to the original pattern as possible. The resulting picture is notable in showing the relatively large number of residual features that survive in the present plan, and this is doubtless a common feature of smaller market towns (Fig. 5).

Beyond this, however, the reconstructed burgage pattern can be used to follow the growth and changes of the medieval plan. In Figure 5 it appears not as a single unitary pattern but as a compound pattern, in which the line of the Bow Burn and the streets defining the limits of the Central Triangle are the 'seams' separating three different parts (cf. also Fig. 1). The largest unit lies to the south-east of the Bow Burn and surrounds, but does not occupy, the interior of the Central Triangle. It forms a roughly circular or oval area and shows the distinctive arrangement of the original burgages of the borough in the three blocks fronting the Central Triangle and the adjoining main streets. The individual burgages generally form rather long narrow strip-plots laid roughly at right-angles to the street-line and parallel to each other. They tend to be oblongs but are often locally deformed in adaptation to site conditions. A characteristically informal, lamellate layout results and when it is duplicated on either side of the same street, as in the eastern stretch of Bondgate, the whole presents a herringbone pattern. Although the name 'High Street' does not occur in the old part of Alnwick, what has just been described is so typical of the medieval main streets, or the widened 'street-market' variants found in most of our market towns, that this plan-unit may well be termed the high-street layout. In the case of Alnwick, however, a high degree of individuality is imparted by the peculiar arrangement of major traffic streets round the Central Triangle, the whole of the latter forming the early market-place as we shall see. It amounts to a special type within the general class based perhaps on its suggested origin from a pre-urban settlement, i.e. a village. Possibly the informality of the burgage shapes also indicates a particular, presumably early, type and is markedly different from the more disciplined layouts of later towns such as those founded by Edward I.

Some further characteristics of this pattern are apparent. Each of the two larger street-blocks, to the north and south of the Central Triangle respectively, consists of a single plot series of burgages reaching a considerable depth (up to 475 feet in the southern block and up to over 580 feet in the northern one). The western block is somewhat similar, but the sharper curve between Fenkle Street and Narrowgate and the angle between Fenkle Street and Clayport Street modify the simpler arrangement. This results in a partial break in the former case, affecting only the rear parts of burgages, and a complete break in the latter, giving rise to a separate plot series on Clayport Street. The relative plot sizes here show clearly that the Fenkle Street frontage was more important than that on Clayport Street, thus obtaining the larger burgages. In other words, frontage to the Central Triangle or the original market was of greater economic value than frontage to one of the main streets. Possibly the shallower series on

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 29

Clayport Street indicates also derivation from two originally larger burgages fronting Fenkle Street and remaining as two small residual plots at the corner of Fenkle Street and Clayport Street after partition. A little farther west, the tributary runnel to the Bow Burn marks another dicontinuity between what are in fact two plot series on Clayport Street, the more westerly one resembling the majority of burgages in plot depth.

What has been discussed so far leaves little doubt that the high-street layout of Alnwick represents the plan of the original borough. In its primitive but highly efficient, large-featured layout, in its economical concentration round a market-place of some 41 acres, and even in the general arrangement of its burgages, it may preserve the trace of an earlier green-village. In its skilful adaptation to natural features it exhibits a topographical individualization of a plan type that is altogether characteristically medieval.

The street-system of this central plan-unit is essentially simple when con- sidered against the general background of street differentiation in the medieval towns of Europe.'" In larger towns, or in towns deliberately planned like the true bastides of south-western France, the colonial towns of eastern Germany, or Edward I's boroughs in Wales, it is generally not difficult to distinguish three functional types of streets, though frequently they are combined in varying degrees. Major traffic streets (Verkehrsstrassen, carrieres at Montpazier) connecting the restricted points of exit from the walled town commonly had the greatest width. Residential streets (Wohnstrassen), carrying traffic to and from adjoining residential plots only, were often narrower. Occupation roads (Wirt- schaftsstrassen), providing subsidiary access, were the narrowest type.

In the earliest plan-unit of Alnwick there is virtually only one type of street. From the corners of the triangular market in the middle three major traffic streets run to the three exits of this earlier town. They were true main streets in the medieval sense of carrying major traffic as well as combining commercial, industrial and residential functions in the associated burgages. The effectiveness of concentration in the plan is brought out by the absence of residential streets. There was no need for them since literally every burgess had already obtained traffic-street location and every other burgess market location. Occupation roads, if they existed in the earliest borough, must have been restricted to the two lanes providing access from the centre to additional sources of water supply: Stonewell Lane on the west side of Fenkle Street and Greenwell Lane on the north side of Bondgate Within. Bearing in mind the technical requirements of medieval passenger and freight transport, it is difficult to imagine a more concentrated, economical and purposeful layout or a more generous one for the accommodation of over 100 burgesses and other householders. Today, in spite of the vicissitudes of many centuries and the more violent changes affecting some of the ancient burgages in recent years, the layout of the early borough, incorporating the inherited outlines of the distant Anglian period, survives as the most impressive traditional plan-unit apart from Alnwick Castle (Fig. 18).

30 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

In the main, the ancient limits of this unit seem fairly clearly indicated by the Bow Burn in the north and north-west, an obvious defensive line, and by Green Batt in the south. Here the siting of the perimeter apparently combined the economic advantages of large burgage depths with those of a reasonably defensive position on the relatively flat shelf formed by the slope of Alnwick Ridge before its steep descent to Market Street (cf. Figs. 4 and 5).

Regarding the Bow Burn line as an early borough perimeter, Mayson's Map shows a town gate, albeit a less elaborate one than those indicated as the Clayport and Bondgate Towers, placed astride Narrowgate in exactly the place where one would expect to find a gate if the Bow Burn formed the town ditch. The way the three names 'Clay-port', 'Bond-Gate' and 'Potte-gate' are written against the three respective gate towers on the map makes it uncertain whether 'Potte-gate' is meant to refer to the actual town gate or to northern Narrowgate, i.e. the street space into which it has been written. If the latter, it is certainly at variance with the burgage list of the same survey which uses 'Potter- gate' for the present street of that name. To confuse the issue further, the map shows no gate towers on the sites of either the present Pottergate Tower or the supposed Narrowgate Tower. Tate records no documentary evidence of Narrowgate Tower but only of a Pottergate Tower on the site of the present one from 1630 onwards. According to one of his notes elsewhere, he cannot have seen the copy of Mayson's Survey now in Alnwick Castle and therefore had no knowledge of its maps." In view of the general accuracy of detail shown on Mayson's Map it seems unlikely that Robert Norton, its surveyor, can have made a major mistake in respect of what must have appeared to him as a prominent public structure worthy of pictorial record along with the other two gate towers. The existence of such a building, moreover, may well be respon- sible for the adjoining stream being called the Bow Burn. The record of May- son's Map then corroborates the conclusion already drawn from examination of the ancient burgage pattern that the Bow Burn marks an earlier borough limit on the north-west side.

In the south-west the original limits seem more uncertain. The short plot series of four deep burgages on the north side of Clayport Street and their separation from the market burgages by the possibly marshy area marked by the confluence of the Bow Burn with its little tributary (X) seems to suggest a later addition. If anything, this would bring the original Clayport exit of the borough to a slightly more defensive position and might have been matched by a similar extension of burgages on the opposite side of Clayport Street. It might also explain the curious deviation of the Clayport tributary to the Bow Burn as artificially effected to form an additional length of town ditch for the original borough. The confluence area is shown on Mayson's Map as what looks like a pond, and Stonewell Lane provides direct access to it from the market. By 1760 some sheds or other outbuildings had appeared round it, and by 1774 the pond had disappeared altogether, giving way to a tanyard. The available evidence

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 31

does not allow one to assert firmly that the upper part of 'Clayport infra',"1 i.e. of Lower Clayport Street within the gate, was in fact an extension to the original borough.

The only other uncertainty about the early limits of the borough concerns the north-east side, i.e. the area to the north-west of Allerburn Lane. Here the tails of the Bondgate burgages jut out in a rectangular pattern which does not accord with the smooth line of the perimeter elsewhere or with its general tendency to adapt itself to the defensive possibilities of relief. This arrangement either represents a later extension of otherwise old burgages or indicates that the medieval town-wall was never built on this side of the borough. In the former case the earlier borough boundary probably ran from Bondgate Tower with the burgage 'grain' north-north-east for some 250 feet or so and then curved in a north-westward direction to follow the western flank of the Allerburn Lane valley and so join the perimeter line of the Bow Burn.

Apart from the actual street spaces the constituent elements, the 'cells' as it were of the high-street layout, are the burgages that are fairly evenly distributed over the three street-blocks under discussion. They are generally large and very elongated representing a distinct type of deep burgage rarely less than 250 feet in depth, their elongation or ratio of depth to width being generally greater than 6 : 1. There is, however, a wide range of sizes, indicating that there was probably no standardization of these plots here in terms of area. In any case, standardi- zation of their frontages would be more important in the plan as such to allow the accommodation of a maximum number of burgages on a minimum of available total street front. This was desirable economically to provide the

largest number of burgesses with main-street location and as defenders of the

borough perimeter in times of danger. The question arises whether there is any evidence to show such frontage standardization and what could have controlled the measurements associated with it. If the borough plan originated in an earlier green-village, the original tofts and crofts could have determined the standard. Alternatively, or in supplementation of this, the buildings may have

provided it. It is not known whether originally the houses forming the plot dominants

of these burgages occupied the plot heads at the street-line in closed formation. However, the discipline of direct, frontal-row development including farm- steads is generally observable in the existing green-villages of North-east England, and suggests that this might have been the case in an original village as much as in the medieval town. At all events Mayson's Map shows it fully established by the early seventeenth century and, if not an original feature, it is likely to have been a medieval one. It presents the familiar picture of traditional burgages, as of strip-plots generally. The greater intrinsic value of the actual frontage normally imparts a tadpole structure to each plot. The plot head at the front contains the plot dominant or main building, housing the essential part of the land use of the plot, together with its yard. The plot tail, generally the larger part in the case of burgages, is occupied by the 'garth' or garden and often

32 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

accommodates subsidiary buildings or plot accessories. The burgages commonly have no front-gardens, i.e. the street-line and the actual or geographical building line, as distinct from that postulated by town planners, coincide. The plan of Teasdale's Yard in 1774 (Fig. 14) illustrates the arrangement. Plot dominants occupy the full frontage and so form rows or serried lines of diverse buildings along the sides of the street, which represents one form of closed building development common to the kernels of historic towns (Fig. 10).

This means that the dimensions of earlier houses might have influenced the standardization of frontages in Alnwick with its narrow burgages at least as much as in the case of some later planned medieval towns for which a direct relation between frontage and house has been proved.'l Earlier building con- struction, even in districts where stone was the principal wall material, depended widely on the use of timber as a skeleton. This not only carried the roof but determined largely the organization of internal space on the principle of 'bays', i.e. the spaces between different pairs of 'crucks'. Although these bays were not necessarily of standard size, the ordinary agricultural unit known as the rod or pole was used in setting out the building plan on the site. Though nominally 16 feet, architectural evidence in England about A.D. 1200 suggests a pole of 18 feet length.20 In any case there may have been regional variations. Any standards of frontages originating in this way might be looked for on Wilkin's Map on the assumption that until then the changes affecting the presumed standard burgages of the original borough were mostly those of amalgamation, mediation and quartering. Subdivision of burgages must have been effected usually, if not always, by splitting them longitudinally into moieties, quarter burgages, or whatever was the required division. As time went on the term 'bur- gage' came to be applied indiscriminately to the full units as well as to the fractional plots. Longitudinal division is proved by Wilkin's Map, which shows the traditional lamellate pattern with hardly any interference from transverse divisions. Subdivisions of burgages must generally have been reflected directly in the measurements of frontages. Halving or mediation, either singly or in repetition, was usual. Thus the existence of an original standard frontage would be indicated in the later plan not only by direct representation of the unit and its multiples but also by the occurrence of such fractional values as -,, -, It 1 , etc., the result of a prolonged process of regrouping of contiguous properties. When applying these considerations to the evidence of 1774, the main difficulty is to obtain accurate measurements within a foot on the MS. original of Wilkin's Map. A check by measurements on the 1/528 Ordnance map proves to be less useful as the building development between 1774 and 1851 had aready interfered too much with the frontages, although it generally left the burgage boundaries behind the plot dominants unaltered. When measuring the frontages on Wilkin's Map, therefore, a margin of error of 1 foot has been allowed wherever measurements deviate from either units or multiples of those dimensions which are most frequently found. The following table records the measurements and groups them into:

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 33

(1) Those related to the most frequently occurring measurement (a = 28 feet).

(2) Those related to the next most frequent measurement (b = 32 feet). (3) Those showing no such relation.

The evidence is interesting. Nearly half the intramural burgages in the oldest part of the borough appear to be related to a unit measurement of 28 feet. The

TABLE I

Burgage Frontages in the Oldest Part of the Medieval Borough

Frontage Measurement Street blocks Number Per cent of total type in feet

N.E. W. S.

?a 14 - 3 - 3 2.75 la 21 3 1 - 4 3.67

a 28 8 5 4 17 15.60 lia 35 2 5 1 8 7.34 45.87 1a 42 3 3 3 9 8.25 la 49 3 3 2 8 7.34 2a 56 - - 1 1 0.92

lb 16 1 2 - 3 2.75' xb 24 4 2 4 10 9.17

b 32 7 1 5 13 11.93 33.94 1?b 40 2 4 3 9 8.25 2b 64 - - 2 2 1.84

26 2 2 2 6 5.51 Not 30 2 - 2 4 3.67 20.19 classified 37 1 2 5 8 7.3420.19

45 1 2 1 4 3.67

TOTALS 39 35 35 109 100.00 100.00

latter is actually represented by about one-third of the burgages in this 'a' group, including the burgage marked '1' in Figure 5, and shown in greater detail as 'Teasdale's Yard' in Figure 14. Another third is similarly related to a unit of 32 feet, which again accounts for one-third of the burgages in the 'b' group. In view of the difficulties of correct measurement on Wilkin's Map it is quite pos- sible that some at least of the burgages not classifiable under groups 'a' or 'b' may nevertheless belong to them. Further, if one remembers that earlier medieval 'standardization' for a variety of reasons was unlikely to require modern precision, the separation of group 'a' from group 'b' might be somewhat unreal and might indicate only the extreme values of a generally acknowledged but in practice loosely defined intermediate system. The evidence indicates then that in Alnwick 28-32 feet was the original standard of burgage frontage, a

34 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

measurement not infrequently found in medieval towns. The smallest measure- ments recorded in Alnwick, 14 feet and 16 feet, are the halves of the two pro- minent units. They represent the common lower limit of 'bay' widths in earlier construction. A standard frontage of 28-32 feet therefore seems to imply that a row house occupying the head of a standard burgage normally formed a build- ing unit of two structural bays. That traditional building methods were in use in Alnwick for a long time, probably right up to the early Georgian period, may be inferred from Tate's statement that during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the houses of Alnwick were generally low and small single- storey thatched buildings.21 The prevailing house depth of 18-20 feet on Wilkin's Map indicates the traditional block-plan of the smaller 'eaves house', i.e. a small row house fronting the street with its eaves instead of its gable. It suggests that even in the middle of the Georgian period the majority of houses were of an earlier traditional type.

Market Colonization

Within its Central Triangle the oldest borough encloses four street-blocks which are so different from it in their shapes and plot pattern as to form a distinct plan-unit suggesting a different origin (Figs. 1, 4, 5 and 6). The blocks are much smaller than those of the surrounding high-street layout, their dis- similar shapes are irregular and angular, and yet their arrangement is not entirely haphazard. They are in fact placed so as to leave a roughly oblong market square between themselves and a fairly wide street space round the perimeter of their own group, thus outlining rather than obscuring the Central Triangle. Their plot pattern shows a mosaic of rather small, generally squat, rectilinear plots, very different from the lamellate arrangement of the surround- ing plan-unit. It has been maintained above that these four blocks are not part of the original borough plan, and there is historical evidence to support this and help to explain the topographical characteristics.

Figure 6 records the relevant evidence in Clarkson's Survey within the plot boundaries of 1774, allowing for the addition of such earlier subdivisions as emerge from a study of the previous borough surveys. These boundaries form a less definite pattern than that of the present time and suggest an intermediate stage of development. In the western block subdivision into well-defined plots is complete. In the block between Paikes Street (formerly Paykes Hole) and Market Passage plot definition exists only on the street fronts, while the eastern block is even less consolidated. The three blocks appear to reflect different stages in a process of crystallization. Doubtless the whole pattern is more mature than that of the Middle Ages, or indeed that of 1567, especially in the western block. The street-lines of the blocks may approximate to those of 1567, but the plots themselves, because of the peculiar nature of their origin, and unlike the burgages of the high-street layout, can be regarded only as topo- graphical 'loci', not as actual outlines of the data of Clarkson's Survey. Even

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 35

A. GENERAL PROPERTY HOLDINGS IN THE CENTRAL {-

CHARACTERISTICS

TRIANGLE OF ALNWICK, 1567 S100 0 IOOFT.

A. GENERAL PROPERTY CHARACTERISTICS:

S PUBLIC UTILITIES

5E: FORMERLY PUBLIC UTILITIES r BUILT ON OUEEN'S HIGHWAY OR LORD'S C NEW IMPROVEMENT WASTE

B. TENURIAL DESIGNATION: SP BURGACE

2 'TENEMENT OR BURGAGE' M HOUSE,OR SMALL HOUSE

i SHOPS

Lw WASTE, OR WASTE BURGAGE A BURCAGE,OR HOUSE HELD

X6 'QUO TITULO IGNOTUM EST'

SL 'RENTED AT HIS LORDSHIP'S PLEASURE'

2*3 C. RENTALS: * MARKET NORMAL RENT, PAID TO BOROUGH REEVE

6I SMALL RENT, D? (4d) 1 \" VERY SMALL RENT, D0 (2d)

7 SCRET

NO RENT, D?

:D REE . RENT PAID TO CASTLE REEVE

I SMITHY 5 LITTLE HOUSE ON THE

2 BERE HOUSES LORD'S WASTE IN IS56 MAE 3 SHOPS, FORMERLY 6 BAKEHOUSE

CROJE A CHAPEL 7 BUTCHER'S SHAMBLES

4 CORPUS CHRISTI HOUSE IN 1774

B. TENURIAL DESGNATION C. RENTALS

100 1 00 FT. 0 loo o loo FT.

6 P

SMARK 2 MARKET M sMA RKT E jjj

MA

MEC OS. CRO E

FIGURE 6

36 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

so, this 'localization' is quite adequate for our purpose as both the street-blocks and the plots are small.

Figure 6 shows those features from Clarkson's Survey that are concentrated within the Central Triangle. In the first place, there are certain public utilities (Map A in Fig. 6) which in the medieval manorial borough were usually held by the lord of the manor but served the community. They were generally sited on a central public open space such as the village green or the market. In Alnwick there were the bakehouse (No. 6), the 'bere Houses' (Nos. 2), and a building called 'Corpus Christi House' (No. 4). Three shops on the north side of the Market Place are mentioned as having formerly been a chapel (No. 3). Premises recorded as having been built on the Queen's highway or the lord's waste indicate the former open space more clearly. They are virtually confined to the Central Triangle. Among them No. I is mentioned in Mayson's Survey as erected originally as a smithy. The other three examples are 'small houses' and a shop. Buildings recently erected on public ground appear also as 'new improvement' (Novui impromt), an entry entirely restricted to the area mapped in Figure 6.

Further hints as to the original state of the Central Triangle can be obtained from the tenurial designations (Map B in Fig. 6). The majority of tenurial units in this area are actually designated 'burgage' (burgagium), but it is manifest that these holdings were very different from the deep burgages of the ancient high- street layout. By Tudor times the term 'burgage', referring to an individual holding within the walled borough, had lost some of its original precision. It had become a generic term for any holding for which rent was paid to the borough reeve, regardless of its origin, provided it had become established long enough on its site. But these small properties, some of them still recorded as 'new improvements' in 1567, did not automatically become 'burgages'. At any rate some had not done so at the time of Clarkson's Survey, but appeared as 'a house' or more significantly as 'a small house', 'a shop' or just 'a waste'. Shops in particular are well known as agents in the colonization of medieval market- places by permanent houses. The usual development leads from the initial temporary stall (selda) to the more permanent shop structure (shopa) and finally to the house, or what in Alnwick had become a 'burgage' on the Central Triangle by 1567. That these burgages were of dubious tenurial origin is in- dicated by the not infrequent remark in Clarkson's Survey that the title by which a certain property is held is unknown (quo titulo ignotum est). This formula is virtually restricted to properties in the western street-block of the Central Triangle. One property in the eastern street-block is rendered 'a tene- ment or burgage' (vniu tent sie by). This suggests a transitional stage between holdings established on the waste, and therefore directly answerable to the lord of the manor like the normal tenement, and the burgage answerable only through the firma burgi. Two of the holdings not designated burgages are recorded as 'rented at his Lordship's pleasure'.

The distribution of all these tenurial designations is significant. So-called

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PLATE III - THE OLD TOWN FROM THE SOUTH-WEST IN 1930 Aerofilms and Aero Pictorial Ltd.

Traditional arterial ribbon of Upper Clayport Street on right, with three deep-burgage series behind it surrounding Central Triangle. Inner Fringe Belt in background and on left, continuing to right with row houses along Dispensary Street and Tower Lane. Intermediate Fringe Belt

in foreground.

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PLATE IV - PART OF OUTER ALNWICK FROM THE SOUTH-WEST IN 1926 Aerofilms and Aero Pictorial Ltd.

From front to back: unconsolidated Outer Fringe Belt, modern residential accretions of St. George's Crescent and York Road, mid and late Victorian residential accretions, Intermediate Fringe Belt about Alnwick Station and beyond South Road.

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 37

burgages predominate in the western street-block but towards the east give way increasingly to designations generally indicating more recent types of establish- ment. This points to a parallel to the degrees of plot consolidation indicated by the boundaries on Wilkin's Map. Evidently the colonization of the Central Triangle with houses proceeded generally from the west and north-west towards the present Market Place and the south-east. It was perhaps retarded in the angle inside the ancient road fork at the east end of the old market and on a level with the main road from the east by the heavier traffic there. The evidence certainly suggests a protracted piecemeal progress which did not reach com- pletion by 1567 or even by 1774. Two instances illustrate this. The Northum- berland Survey of 1586 records 'a little house lately builded vpon the Lords Wast and the Queens street' characteristically without specifying any rent.22 This new encroachment on the highway and perhaps Greenwell Lane (No. 5 in Fig. 6) is mentioned nowhere in Clarkson's Survey and must have originated, therefore, between 1567 and 1586. Although the Butchers' Shambles existed before 1715 and are almost certainly of medieval origin, their repeated rebuild- ing has changed the size and outline of the street-block which they represent. The outline shown in Figure 6 (No. 7) is that of the building and plot erected by the lord of the manor in 1764. As late as 1826, the block was entirely rebuilt as the 'Assembly Rooms' and considerably enlarged so that the modern Market Street was completely separated from the Market Place. If, therefore, the whole plan-unit within the Central Triangle continued to develop until recent times, Mayson's Map on the other hand shows it already established in its general extent, with a number of short rows of houses parallel or at right angles to each other. The impression is not unlike that of the stall arrangement on a market- place.

To return to the evidence of Clarkson's Survey, the half-yearly rentals give additional material that supports the other evidence (Map C in Fig. 6). The normal rents for the ancient burgages within the walled town payable to the borough reeve range from 7d. to 12d., but most are 8d. or 9d. They apply also to twenty-one of the fifty-four holdings under discussion. The remainder show anomalies that are very rare among the ancient burgages of the high-street layout. Their borough rentals are either small (between 2d. and 4d.) or alto- gether non-existent. This reflects the initial smallness of the properties or their incidental origin which tends to leave them both without a proper record of rents and without a known title. Thus no rents are paid in some cases (nihil quia nulla in rotulis mentio). Some of these holdings show a more direct relation to the lord of the manor by paying rent to the castle reeve. In the case of the 'bere Houses' (Nos. 2) this is not surprising, but in the other cases it suggests building on the lord's waste.

The topographical and the historical evidence then point to the important conclusion - independent of any hypothesis about a preceding green-village - that the great Central Triangle of Alnwick was originally a large open space. This was doubtless the ancient market-place of this border town. In size it may

D

38 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

reflect the requirements of an earlier agricultural community on this site, and certainly those of a regional centre suitably equipped with space for a large stock market. Certain buildings of public use made their appearance early in this market-place. During the later centuries of border warfare, when the borough had become a walled town with a more fully developed urban character, the restricted space within the walls appears to have put a premium on the central location of properties. Notwithstanding the extension of the built-up area, the increasing pressure on available open space at the centre resulted in the gradual filling-up of the ancient triangular market-place.

This particular type of secondary growth on an already established market- place is common in medieval towns, especially those that were walled. The process may be called market colonization. It implies an internal addition to the street-plan in the full sense (i.e. one resulting in the formation of new streets and street-blocks on the old market-place, and within a previously developed street- system).

The general nature and result of market colonization are well exhibited in Alnwick. The central street-blocks developed spontaneously from more or less isolated small buildings, shops and stalls by slow coalescence into close-grained, compact blocks distinguishable as market concretions from the surrounding older street-blocks. Today their average building coverage (i.e. the amount of plot area covered by buildings and expressed as a percentage of the total plot area) ranges from 85 to 100.

Their arrangement creates a well-defined plan-unit with small internal streets serving today as occupation roads or at most as minor shopping streets. The whole complex of market concretions had to fit into a pre-existing outline as its morphological frame. It tended to mould its overall shape in response to pre-established requirements on the site, thereby giving an instance of morpho- logical conformity characteristic of this type of plan-unit. This meant first the preservation of a compact open area in the middle as a residual market-place, though its shrinkage inevitably brought about a measure of dispersion of the market function about the Central Triangle with attendant specialization." It also meant the preservation of unimpeded frontage access to the ancient burgages round the triangle, and the fixation of this perimeter as a series of relatively broad double-sided streets (Bondgate-Narrowgate, Fenkle Street, Market Street) to serve established needs and rights of circulation.

The Borough Extension

The market concretions of the Central Triangle in Alnwick developed slowly over a long period and, so far from being contemporary with the high- street layout of the earlier borough surrounding them, were in part at least post- medieval. Figure 5 indicates, however, that there was in fact another addition to the earlier borough which was included in the area surrounded by the late- medieval town-wall (cf. also Fig. 1). It comprises the Pottergate (Barresdale

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 39

Street)2" and Narrowgate district beyond the Bow Burn and is an early example of a peripheral accretion. Possibly the intramural burgages near the former Clayport Tower belonged to it.

The siting of this Pottergate accretion is explained by the fact that of all the three arterial exits from the earlier borough the north-west one offered the most sheltered position between the town and the Bailiffgate suburbium. By incorporating it within the town-wall, moreover, the obsolete defensive line of the Bow Burn could be exchanged for the more satisfactory line along the present Dispensary Street and Northumberland Street.

The new accretion shows marked differences as well as some similarities to the plan of the earlier borough. In it only Narrowgate preserves the informal curving lines of the older street-plan, whereas Barresdale Street is notably straight even though it ascends a fairly steep slope. Clarkson's Survey records the whole quarter as occupied by burgages and other holdings but, as seen earlier, the process of filling up the Narrowgate end and thereby enclosing the old 'Alien Lane' was only just nearing completion in Elizabethan days.

The plot pattern of the Pottergate area supports this general impression. It is markedly asymmetrical, and somewhat different in this respect from the high-street layout of the earlier town. Burgages resembling those of the latter in size and general shape form a plot series along the south side of Barresdale Street and seem to represent burgages in the original sense of the term. They differ from the presumably earlier borough burgages to the east only in the greater rectilinearity of their shapes, which accords with their contourwise arrangement and has enabled some of them, in spite of their narrowness, to accommodate two rope-walks in the nineteenth century as well as a long straight row of cottages. The only informal element is introduced by the morphological frame of the Bow Burn and affects more particularly the easternmost burgage which lay right alongside the brook. On the north side of Barresdale Street, the holdings are rather squat and comparable to the tenement plots in Bailiffgate, except for the more elongated plots on Narrowgate. All of them, except two on the east side of the latter street, were recorded as burgages in 1567, but three of the smallest at the corner of the two streets were given as subdivisions of a former burgage. This must have had its house and main frontage on Narrow- gate rather than Barresdale Street," thereby emphasizing the importance of Narrowgate as a thoroughfare. Towards the north-west, within the angle of the late-medieval town-wall, the plot pattern appears immature in that land divisions on the site of the ancient highway remained large.

The Town-Wall

The late-medieval town-wall, enclosing the high-street layout as well as the Pottergate area, has been mentioned repeatedly. Much of its site still forms an important residual feature in the present town plan, although the fabric has long disappeared except for the impressive pile of Bondgate Tower.

40 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

The licence for fortifying the town was granted only in the first half of the fifteenth century and the town-wall was completed, at least on the north-west, west and south sides, in the second half.26 The unusually late date may be as much the result of the inability of the town to pay for the work as of the sharpen- ing of Anglo-Scottish tensions in the immediate pre-Tudor period. The gates were Bondgate Tower, Clayport, Pottergate Tower and, according to Tate, Narrowgate Tower (Fig. 5). Tate produces no documentary evidence of the last-named, and Mayson's Map is somewhat at variance with his statements. Nevertheless, in view of the documentary evidence for the post-medieval Pottergate Tower and the structural as well as documentary data for the north- west corner of the wall, the site of the town-walls on the north-west side of the borough as shown in Fig. 5 may be accepted at least as a later version of the fortification.2' The wall seems to have served its purpose for about a century, when the union between England and Scotland made it superfluous. Its decay and partial dismantling for building purposes must have begun earlier. Al- though Thoresby, travelling through Alnwick in 1681, still noticed the 'old wall',28 there is no sign of it on the earlier map in Mayson's Survey. Bondgate Tower, Clayport Tower and the 'Pottergate' by the Bow Burn are in fact the only parts of the defensive works shown. Tate's Pottergate Tower and Narrow- gate Tower are conspicuously absent from this map. Yet portions of the wall at the north-west comer on the east side of the present Northumberland Street existed in Tate's time, and from what follows it appears that in 1624 as well as in 1774 the town-wall and its remains were treated cartographically simply as boundary lines. That the wall seems to have been extensively decayed even before 1603 is suggested by the fact that in most cases its sites on either side of the main gates were apparently held as burgages in private occupation. The fate of the town gates varied. Narrowgate Tower, if ever built as a gatehouse, seems to have disappeared first, as there is no record of it. The only site feature indicative of the ancient boundary between the borough and Bailiffgate here is the existing slight stagger in the street-line on the west side of Narrowgate, first recorded properly on Wilkin's Map. A Pottergate Tower stood on the site of the present one in 1630 when it came into the possession of the town. "The existing structure was built in 1767-78. Clayport Tower was removed in 1804. Bondgate Tower,"9 however, stands today as the only remains of the medieval fortification.

Notwithstanding its relatively short period of use, the town-wall persisted for a sufficiently long time to mark the urban fringe of the Old Town, to leave important residual features in Alnwick's plan, and to exert some morphological influence beyond that. It divides the great central area of traditional burgage patterns frcm the surrounding areas which have plot patterns generally characteristic of subsequent accretions. Moreover, its site has become the

fixation line for a number of peripheral streets that now form a ring-like system round most of the old borough.

The oldest of these consequent streets are the contiguous lines of Hotspur

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 41

Street, Green Batt and Tower Lane. They are first recorded on Mayson's Map, where the eastern part of Green Batt is shown as an open space over 100 feet wide. In the Middle Ages it had been public ground used for the practice of archery.0? Its partial enclosure and the consequent narrowing of the street space to its present dimensions did not begin until the middle of the eighteenth century. After that it provided the space for a number of land-use units with public functions. On Wilkin's Map Hotspur Street is an occupation road lead- ing to Green Batt, while Tower Lane is little more than a footpath crossing obliquely the burgage established here over the site of the town-wall and ditch.

Mayson's Map shows neither Dispensary Street nor Northumberland Street. These developed gradually as footpaths, and later as streets, on the site of the town ditch, but from Pottergate southward the site of Dispensary Street was early known as the Arrowbutts, indicating another open space used for archery.31

On the north side of the borough, between Narrowgate and Bondgate Tower, there is no trace of a town-wall, and it is doubtful whether a wall ever existed here, for the castle would probably afford sufficient protection. The O.S. Plans of 1851 and 1864 show the former site of the town-wall on other sides of the borough but not here. The 'probable site' of the wall shown on the O.S. 1/2500 Plans of 1921 along Bondgate is obviously absurd and is supported neither by any historical or archaeological evidence nor, one feels, by anything known of medieval town plans in general. As the borough appears to have found it difficult to finance the building of the walls,"3 it seems reasonable to assume that no wall was constructed along the castle moat in the Bow Burn valley. The gap between the latter and Bondgate Tower, however, is less easily explained, as the greater distance from the castle and the surface configuration here certainly seem to require a wall. If the rear of the ancient burgages was extended in this part to form the pattern shown on both Wilkin's Map and Mayson's Map, it could be assumed that the wall, when coming into private ownership, was here used as a quarry of dressed building stone. The disappearance of the line marking the old periphery of the borough could be the more easily understood as there was here no occasion for footpaths or open spaces along the town ditch, since all the land to the north belonged to the demesne and was already shown fully enclosed on Mayson's Map. At all events no traces of structural remains appear to have been found during the continuous gardening operations on this site since the middle of last century.33

Walkergate

Beyond its town-wall the medieval borough had one built-up area which, though physically detached, was functionally an integral part of it. This was Walkergate (Figs. 5 and 7; also Fig. 1), where the fullers or walkers settled near the river."' The evidence of Mayson's Map and the remains of the late medieval Chantry of St. Mary suggest that the present street occupies much the same site

42 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

as its medieval predecessor, though the actual street space may have been subject to a modern standardization of width. On Mayson's Map the street is built-up on both sides, with plots somewhat similar to those in Bailiffgate, and this agrees with the evidence in Clarkson's Survey which divides both street frontages into burgage series. But later changes, mainly demolition, enclosure and associated depopulation, were so great that already on Wilkin's Map a

CANONGATE AND WALKERGATE

A//ClINTmT

CANO#- CATE

SCALE OF FEET

- - - MID AND LATE VICTORIAN MODERN

- - ANCIENT BRIDGE AND ROAD SPACES OPEN FRONTAGES, FORMERLY BUILT-UP

ANCIENT FOD - - 8TH CENTURY COURSE OF VE ALN

'\ WA

MID-. "ANDLATErVITORIAN MO"E.

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A1 COURSE OFRIVER-ALN

FIGURE 7

reconstruction of the supposed medieval burgage plots is achieved only with difficulty and is necessarily incomplete. All that can be said with reasonable certainty is that the eastern half of the north side towards the river must have been the main area occupied by the fullers. Here convenient water-frontage was obtained at the rear end of each plot, for the river then followed a southerly course through Walkergate Haugh and was artificially braided to bring the

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 43

water against the rear ends of the plots, as is shown on Mayson's Map and on Thompson's Map of 1760. But here again, subsequent changes, occasioned by the extensions and improvements of the Duke's parkland, have been great. Altogether, the Walkergate area, although it still contains the remains of the Chantry of St. Mary, is today a district hardly dominated by residual features of the Middle Ages.

Early Accretions

How far medieval Alnwick had any built-up areas outside its gates on the two southern main roads is not clear from historical evidence, though the mention of a burgage in Bondgate 'beyond the tower' in 1483 suggests that some dwellings did occur in such position.35 Clarkson's Survey lists a great number of 'burgages' which from comparison with subsequent surveys and Wilkin's Map must have occupied both sides of Bondgate 'Without' from Bondgate Tower to Denwick Lane, and similarly both sides of Upper Clayport Street from Clayport Tower to the present junction of Clayport Street and Lisburn Terrace (Figs. 1 and 8).36 Intermixed with them were a smaller number of tenements, usually styled 'toft and croft'. Similarly, the northern stretch of Howling Lane just outside Pottergate Tower had a number of burgages on each side of the road.3~ In addition, there were tenements in the fields near Bondgate, but the survey specifically refers to their dwellings as abandoned by their holders in favour of houses within the borough.38 Finally, Clayport Bank as far as the present St. Thomas's Farm contained burgages which seem to have been all waste and con- verted into 'riggs' of land (selio).39 Of all these extramural areas only about half the length of Bondgate Without and a similar stretch on Clayport Street are shown as occupied by buildings and their crofts on Mayson's Map (Fig. 1). The general impression gained from this evidence is that residential occupation of these areas must have fluctuated a great deal in the period before the seventeenth century. The conditions of border warfare and the frequent economic difficulties of the town could easily account for this. The restricted extent of built-up frontages shown on Mayson's Map for these roads is certainly in marked con- trast to the relevant distribution implied by the incidence of 'burgages' and 'tofts and crofts' in Clarkson's Survey. It suggests that these terms refer to an earlier, presumably late-medieval condition, and even then not all the parcels of land so named were necessarily occupied by inhabited buildings at the same time. The extent of houses shown on Mayson's Map was to remain much the same for about another 150 years, except that the frontages of Bondgate Without were gradually and partly filled with houses up to the junction with Denwick Lane as shown on Thompson's Map of 1760 and Wilkin's Map of 1774.

The uncertainty in the interpretation of the earlier evidence also attends any attempt at reconstruction of the old plot boundaries with one exception. The empty burgages and other plots are shown clearly enough on Mayson's Map and there can be little doubt that the existing plot pattern on the north side

44 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

of Upper Clayport Street preserves the original burgage series at least as well as the plot boundaries of the old borough do in the case of theirs (Fig. 8). Even the existing coincidence of street-line and building-line may be regarded at least as late medieval. Here, then, we have the earliest form of one of the most com- mon types of plan-units resulting from peripheral expansion in towns: the arterial ribbon.

On the south side of the same road reconstruction, though not as easy, is still possible with the help of the first O.S. plans. Subsequent developments, however, have effaced the old plot boundaries except for the small area of traditional cottages to the west of Monkhouse Terrace.

In the case of Bondgate Without the task is made more difficult by the original irregularity of the pattern, as well as by considerable changes in individual plots. Nevertheless, some existing plot boundaries here correspond to those shown on Mayson's Map.

Finally, a reconstruction of plot boundaries to the west of Pottergate Tower is impossible. Mayson's Map already lacks the necessary information, and the present landscape contains no residue from these earlier times except the street space of Howling Lane.

Canongate The only built-up area of the Middle Ages which remains to be discussed is

Canongate, anciently forming a settlement separate from Alnwick and Bailiff- gate (Figs. 1, 3 and 7)."o It was a manor belonging to Alnwick Abbey, separated from it by the Aln. The close topographical relation normally found between a pre-urban nucleus such as a castle or monastery and the trading settlement developing under its gate in suburbium position was therefore absent. Canongate (the street of the Canons) grew along the road from the Abbey to St. Michael's Church and Alnwick. The ford across the Aln lay at some distance from the monastery in a northward meander loop. The physical separation of the little manorial market settlement from its abbey may have been dictated as much by this as by the circumstance that the south side of the river, with its rising slope towards Alnwick and the regional routeways, gave more room for development. Growth during the Middle Ages was very modest and was no doubt hampered by the rise of Alnwick. Though separate gilds developed in Canongate, its market remained small and appears to have had no formative influence on the earlier plan other than a small widening of the single street near the river. At the time of the Dissolution of Monasteries the manor contained thirty-six burgages, besides two copyholds. The reconstruction of their boundaries, as indeed of the full medieval plan, is not easy (Fig. 7). Mayson's Map, being chiefly concerned with Alnwick, shows Canongate simply as a single long row of houses on the east side of the street without any plot pattern whatever. The latter appears first on Thompson's Map, and more reliably on Wilkin's Map. By that time both sides of the street were built up with cottages in row formation

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 45

BONDGATE WITHOUT AND UPPER CLAYPORT STREET

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46 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

and the pattern had already suffered considerable alterations. However, part of the east side showing plots comparable in character to the burgages in Clayport Street outside Clayport Tower survives as the medieval residue of Canongate though its building arrangement has changed in some cases. Elsewhere in Canongate amalgamation had proceeded far in the eighteenth century. The remaining strip-plots on the west side of the street are so straight on Wilkin's Map as to suggest either that the west side was altogether of recent develop- ment, which would agree with Mayson's Map, or that it had been subject to an extensive refashioning of plots.

The Fields of Alnwick

Beyond the built-up area of medieval and early modern Alnwick lay the open countryside, containing the borough fields with their field lanes and the ancient common land of Aydon Forest or Alnwick Moor, as well as the lord's demesne. The medieval field system of the town is of interest in its own right and together with the field systems of Northumberland in general deserves a separate investigation. For the purpose of this study it is sufficient to note only the conditions of ownership and enclosure in so far as they influenced the further expansion of Alnwick's built-up area.

Mayson's Map shows the traditional system already modified (Fig. 9). About half of the fields were then enclosed. Over the remainder the map in- dicates a pattern of furlongs and rigs in which the lord of the manor had his strips intermingled with those of the burgesses and tenants. This open-field area lay to the south-east of the town, between the river and the southern bound- ary of the manor, and mainly on the sandy drift. Most of the boulder clay to- wards the eastern extremity of the manor already showed fairly large closes (cf. Figs. 9 and 3). The main areas of enclosed fields lay to the south of the town, chiefly on boulder clay and on the sandstone, whinstone and limestone of the Alnwick Ridge, and on the boulder clay and the sandy drift to the west of the town. The largest enclosures in fact were located in this area and comprised demesne lands and lands that had earlier belonged to Alnwick Abbey.41

Already in 1624 enclosed demesne land dominated the picture to the north and west of the town, and in the south-east at a little distance from Bondgate Without, whereas the south-west and, even nearer to the old borough, the south was all enclosed land in the hands of freeholders. This situation persisted in subsequent periods and meant that in the earlier stages of modern growth the town found it easiest to expand southward. As Tate noted, the land of owners willing to sell for building purposes, particularly the smaller enclosures, lay mainly on this side.42

Figure 9 shows the development of the field pattern43 as well as those ele- ments that have survived as residues in the present plan. From a comparison with Figures 1 and 21 a fact of general significance emerges. At successive stages the field pattern surrounding the Old Town appears as a formative factor

FIGURE 9-The fields of Alnwick.

1 Boundaries from before 1620, not now existing Existing boundaries, dating from the period:

2 before 1620 3 1620-1760 4 1760-1866 5 1866-1897 6 after 1897

Land held in intermixed strips by the lord of the manor and other holders in 1620, thereafter held in closes by:

7 the lord of the manor in 1760 and 1846 8 the lord of the manor in 1760, and various owners in 1846 9 various owners in 1760, and the lord of the manor in 1846

10 various owners in 1760 and 1846 Land held in closes by:

11 the lord of the manor in 1620, 1760 and 1846 12 the lord of the manor in 1620 and 1760, and other owners in 1846 13 the lord of the manor in 1620, and other owners in 1760 and 1846 14 various owners in 1620, and the lord of the manor in 1760 and 1846 15 various owners in 1620 and 1760, and the lord of the manor in 1846 16 various owners in 1620 and 1846, and the lord of the manor in 1760 17 holders other than the lord of the manor since before 1620 18 holders other than the lord of the manor since before 1620, but held by

Prideaux Selby, Esq. in 1846

THE FIEL

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"IELDS OF ALNWICK

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8 T 14 FIELD NAMES AT DIFFERENT DATES SHOWN THUS :-

S9 15s 1620 - GOOSE FLAT

7 10 i 16 1760 - (CROSS FLATS) o II 17 1846 - wesr CROFT

12 18

SCALE OF FEET

0 500 I000 1500 2000 I• I. I I 6

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FIGURE 9

MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK 47

in the evolution of the street-plan. It serves as a guiding framework for sub- sequent development, determining the topographical detail of later plan features. Its field lanes tend to become minor traffic streets or major dwelling streets of new built-up areas, and its field boundaries to define the actual limits of later plan-units. In short, the field pattern serves as a morphological frame for sub- sequent urban growth, a common phenomenon in urban geography."4

REFERENCES x The position of the medieval bridge has been plotted on the basis of Mayson's Map, 1622, and

Thompson's Map, 1760. 2 MAWER, op. cit., 237. 3 The medieval castle in Figure 5 is based on TATE, op. cit., vol. i, plate iv, fig. 2, and 85-6, 253. 4 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 84, 117-18, 134. 5 Clarkson's Survey, 1567, fols. 43, 44, 46. 6 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 135. 7 Ibid., vol. i, 448; vol. ii, 366. 8 R. E. DICKINSON, op. cit., 345, 360, 369, 404. E. J. SIEDLER, Miirkischer Stiidtebau im Mittelalter

(1914), 12. Cf. also E. ENNEN, Friihgeschichte der europdischen Stadt (1953), 124. 9 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, app. i. 10 Ibid., vol. i, 87. 11 Ibid., vol. i, 86, 93, 149. 12 Ibid., app. iii and iv. 13 Ibid., vol. i, 249-50, 312, 319; vol. ii, 321-49. 14 Ibid., vol. i, 245, 247. 15 Clarkson's Survey, 1567, fol. 24. For the meaning of burgagium vide J. TAIT, The medieval

English borough (1936), 99, n. 7, 106-7; forfirma burgi, ibid., chapter vii. 16 Street differentiation like many other details of medieval urban morphology received -arly

attention from investigators on the Continent. The latter evolved the first terminology of functional street types, especially in the area of medieval German colonization which provided a particularly good field of observation in this respect. Cf. CH. KLAIBER, Die Grundrissbildung der deutschen Stadt im Mittelalter (1912), 49-52; SIEDLER, op. cit., 46-56; DICKINSON, op. cit., 316, 479.

17 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 71 f.n., 286-7. 18 So called in the Survey of Northumberland, 1586, fol. 37. 19 SIEDLER, op. cit., 60, cites the cases of Soldin and Spremberg in eastern Germany. Examples of

comparable frontages occur in Sauveterre de Guienne and Valence d'Agen. Cf. T. F. TOUT, Medieval town planning (1934), 20. For the best known example (Bern), cf. H. STRAHM, 'Der zahringische Griindungsplan der Stadt Bern', Archiv des Historischen Vereins des Kantons Bern, 39 (1948), 361ff.

20 HUGH BRAUN, An introduction to English medieval architecture (1951), 70-1. 21 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 245. 22 Survey of Northumberland, 1586, fol. 26. 23 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 450-2. 24 Before the survey of 1586 Pottergate bore the name Barresdale Street, because it led along

'Hooling Lane' (1677) to the 'Burndales' (Mayson's Survey, 1624) or 'Barresdale', the area now occupied by Barndale Riggs, Barndale House and Barndale Cottage. Cf. TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 366.

25 Clarkson's Survey, 1567, fol. 42. 26 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 236-44, app. iv; vol. ii, app. vii. 27 Cf. also Clarkson's Survey, 1567, fol. 44. 28 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 244. 29 Now popularly, though erroneously, referred to as Hotspur Tower. Cf. TATE, op. cit.,

vol. i, 241. 30 Ibid., vol. ii, 283. 31 Ibid., vol. ii, 283. 32 Ibid., vol. ii, app. vii. 33 Information kindly supplied by the Duke of Northumberland's head gardener. "4 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 101, 245; vol. ii, 366.

48 MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN ALNWICK

31 Ibid., vol. i, 245. 36 Clarkson's Survey, 1567, fols. 13, 14, 30-2, 35-8.

37 Ibid., fols. 40-5. 38 Ibid., fols. 19-21. 39 Ibid., fols. 36-7. 40 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 245, 337, 449; vol. ii, 367-8. 41 Ibid., vol. ii, 391. 42 Ibid., vol. ii, 369. 43 Based on Mayson's Map, 1624, Thompson's Map, 1760, and the Tithe Map, 1846. 44 The case of Nottingham, representative of many others, is illustrated in W. G. HOSKINS, The

making of the English landscape (1955), 216-23, after J. D. CHAMBERS, A century of Nottingham history, 1851-1951, and Modern Nottingham in the making (1945).

CHAPTER 6

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

Economic and Social Development A COMPARISON of Mayson's Map with those of Thompson and Wilkin shows that the physical growth of Alnwick from 1625 to 1775 was almost negligible. It was practically confined to a consolidation of the two arterial ribbons, a filling up of the western end of Bailiffgate North Row, and the addition of Canongate West Row. The picture is one of relative stagnation. Yet the economic life of the town, like that of the countryside around it, functioned normally, and benefited from the cessation of border warfare and the advent of greater public security. Coupled with this were the improvements made partly by the governing body of the town (the four chamberlains and the Four- and-Twenty or Common Council), and partly by the Dukes of Northumber- land. But before agricultural improvement was fully under way and its force could be felt in the Northumbrian countryside, the economic resources of the region set a limit to the further development of its market town. Alnwick was too far away from the coalfield to come within the orbit of the industrial develop- ment there. On the other hand, the advent of the turnpike roads enhanced Alnwick's situation as a major stage on the Great North Road, at its junction with the Hexham-Alnmouth Turnpike. The choice of Alnwick Castle by the first Duke of Northumberland as his residence was also of economic benefit to the town in various ways, though the Duke's presence involved him in a pro- tracted struggle with the corporation concerning the manorial rights in Alnwick Moor.

Up to c. 1775 changes in the fabric of the town had been moderate, but the period between then and 1851 saw much building. It took the form of more extensive replacements within the old built-up area as well as of new plan-units on the outskirts, and it reflected the quickening pace of economic development (Figs. 1, 10-13). The population of Alnwick parish increased from less than 5000 in 1801 to nearly 6000 in 1821 and more than 7000 in 1851, of whom 6400 resided in Alnwick with Canongate townships. The development of agriculture and of communications was responsible. The new turnpike roads revivified places like Alnwick.' The Great North Road had already been a post-road in the seventeenth century and became a turnpike road in 1741. The road from Hexham to Alnmouth via Rothbury and Alnwick was turnpiked in 1753-54 and the route from Alnwick to Haggerston via Canongate and Eglingham during the years 1824-26.

The records of the various gilds in Alnwick bear witness to the continued diversity of economic activities. The meeting-place of some of these incor- porated trades was for some time in Clayport Tower until the new Town Hall was erected in the Market." Among the ten companies the merchants were still

49

50 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

the most important, followed by the tanners, which indicated the traditional importance of the leather trade. Early in the nineteenth century four breweries were producing on a large scale.3

The increasing traffic passing through the town on the new turnpike roads brought good business to a number of inns. In Bondgate the White Swan (Figs. 10, 11, 12) was the largest of all, having then already increased its frontage by the amalgamation of two of the ancient burgages. It was the post-stage of the town. In Fenkle Street were other hostelries, the Angel and the Griffin (now Nag's Head). Bondgate Without, Narrowgate and Bailiffgate had other hostelries.4

As a service centre, however, Alnwick was not of high rank.5 Though in 1822 still nominally a county town with a monthly county-court, it had to share the Quarter Sessions with Newcastle, Morpeth and Hexham and enjoyed none of the distinctions and privileges of a county town. It merely provided the venue for the election of Members of Parliament and of the county coroners. It had no banking-houses of its own. On the other hand it was an established local market town with large cattle markets.

The moderate but increasing measure of prosperity brought about a number of improvements, partly expressing the social life and cultural aspirations of the community in the manner of the period, partly calculated to increase the material well-being of the town as a whole. In the aggregate their effect on Alnwick's townscape was considerable.

Among the institutions gaining gradually more importance were schools supported by the town or by private charity.6 Between 1630 and 1854 half a dozen schools of general importance were founded in the town.

The first mention of a workhouse in 1785 and subsequent provisions for its accommodation in new buildings shows the effort to meet social needs in another direction, especially with the reorganization of poor relief in the new Poor-Law Unions after 1834.' Similarly, Alnwick saw the institution of a new Correction House (1807), a Court-House (1856), and a Dispensary, the later Alnwick Infirmary, founded in 1815.* The increase of workmen in Alnwick's industries is indicated indirectly and the social efforts to improve their oppor- tunities directly by two foundations: the Savings Bank established in 1816, and the Mechanics Institute inaugurated in 1824.9 In the same period the Alnwick Theatre was built.

The religious life of the period with its sectarianism was represented by the building of fourteen chapels, of which about half a dozen survive today.'x Finally, the third Duke of Northumberland built the large St. Paul's Church to the south of Green Batt in 1846.11

Among the physical improvements effected during the Late Georgian period were the erection of a gasworks (1825), the improvement of the water supply,12 and the paving of the main streets.'"

A new town hall was built in 1736, after the old 'bere Houses' were pulled down and a suitable central site thus provided. Among other property rebuilt or

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 51

newly erected by the chamberlains of the town was the Pottergate Tower (1767-68) and the new fire-engine house (1811)." The replacement of the Shambles by the Dukes of Northumberland in 1764 and again in 1826 as the new 'Assembly Rooms' has already been noted.

The Assembly Rooms indicate something of the importance of Alnwick as a social centre for the county gentry in the eighteenth century. This was also reflected in an appreciable amount of rebuilding, replacing earlier more humble dwellings with new town houses. Bailiffgate House and Bondgate Hall (rebuilt c. 1810)'~ are more notable examples.

Whereas the changes so far discussed were more directly and organically connected with the life of the market town, others affected the town plan of Alnwick in quite a different way. The first Duke of Northumberland made Alnwick Castle his chief residence"6 and carried out considerable renovation and extension of the castle between 1766 and 1769, though the general features of its medieval layout were preserved. Furthermore, the Duke embarked on an ambitious scheme of park development in the neighbourhood of Alnwick, so as to provide a fit and proper setting for the residence of a great peer in accordance with the landscaping fashion of the time. The scarpland country round Alnwick with its magnificent views to the Cheviots, to Scotland, and to the sea gave excellent scope, especially in and about the gorge stretch of the Aln valley, and was soon to become a newly created Hulne Park. In Lancelot Brown, himself a Northumbrian, the Duke found one of the foremost designers in the new style who put the new ideas into practice on his estate. The work went on from the middle of the eighteenth century to the Duke's death in 1786 and was con- tinued by his successors until after the middle of the nineteenth century.'7 These activities affected the physical growth of Alnwick in three ways. First, they consolidated the land held by the Percy family on the north side of the town and extended it over most of the area of Canongate, Walkergate, Bailiff- gate, the rear of the ancient burgages on the north side of Bondgate, and virtually all the land on the north side of Bondgate Without as well as the present Denwick Lane (Fig. 9). This resulted in great changes within the built- up area of these parts and stopped the expansion of the town in that direction (Fig. 1). Secondly, they involved important alterations in the road system on the whole north side of Alnwick, aided by successive river floods which des- troyed the old bridges and led to their rebuilding on new sites. Thirdly, Alnwick was deprived of the economic advantage of a situation on a main railway line, since the efforts of the third Duke to keep the Newcastle and Berwick line away from his parklands caused the line to be sited three miles to the east in 1847. The town was connected with it only by a branch line (1850) reaching as far as the south-eastern tip of the built-up area.'"

The old road to Denwick from Bondgate Tower via Allerburn Lane past Barnardside to the present Denwick Lane (Figs. 1 and 9) was closed and re- placed by the present one along Fisher Lane and the old cattle drove following the Aller Burn northward.'" The existing Denwick Bridge was built at the same

52 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

time. The other major road deviation concerned the ancient Eglingham Road. Canongate Manor had been bought by the first Duke in 1765 and nearly all the remainder of the original possessions of Alnwick Abbey in the district came to the Percy family before the middle of the nineteenth century.20 The resulting gradual enclosure of Canongate Common was matched by the restriction of the old drove-road of Ratten Row until the ancient Eglingham Road was finally closed by Act of Parliament in 1826. The third Duke contributed largely to the new Eglingham turnpike road, which branched from the middle of Canongate on its west side where a number of burgages had been pulled down, crossed the new Canongate Bridge over the Aln (Fig. 7) and, passing close by the site of Alnwick Abbey, ascended the plateau in a northerly direction to avoid the depth of the Aln gorge. The Great North Road experienced only a small devia- tion from its medieval line, occasioned by a flood in 1770 when the ancient bridge below the castle was destroyed and was entirely rebuilt three years later some 100 feet or so higher up the river as the present Lion Bridge.21 It came, there- fore, more in line with the Peth (Fig. 7).

Besides these changes, the open space immediately around the castle was enlarged by truncation of the ancient burgages on the north side of Bondgate (Figs. 5 and 11, also 1 and 9). The area gained in this way was embanked and planted so as to screen it from outside view and to provide a landscape setting on this side. To the north of Bondgate Without the area of the Goose Knows, also acquired from various owners, was laid out as a large formal garden during the course of the nineteenth century.

Similarly, many of the old burgages in the Walkergate area were incor- porated in the park grounds and their houses pulled down (Figs. 7 and 9).

The Structure and Expansion of the Built-up Area in General

In the development of Alnwick's town plan the changes just described caused a certain atrophy of the built-up area in its northern extremity, notably in Canongate and Walkergate, and a permanent exclusion of land here from the normal operation of the property market. In the west and south-west the West Demesne, most of St. Thomas's Field, and the Swansfield estate, all backed by the ancient common of Alnwick Moor, imposed conditions almost as stringent. The distribution of landownerships in 1760 and 1846 gives some idea of the position round Alnwick (Fig. 9). By about 1825, when the expansion of the town began, the greater degree of subdivision of ownerships on the south side provided virtually the only outlet for Alnwick's growth in terms of smaller houses and complete layouts, whereas a stationary and indeed recessive town fringe was established on the north side from Denwick Lane to the West Desmesne (Figs. 1 and 9). This excentric development is a feature of Alnwick's growth that has lasted till modern times, modified only partly by recent exten- sions in the west and east.

During the Georgian period only the erection of larger houses around the

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 53

Old Town was less affected by this rule. In the immediate environs of Alnwick, often in more or less direct contact with the fringe of its built-up area, a number of larger residences were built on desirable open sites within their own orna- mental grounds. They bore witness to the presence of prosperous tradesmen and influential people who owned land in various parts on the outskirts or else were able to obtain more favourable sites from larger landowners. Of these new residences, Swansfield House in the south-west was the earliest, recorded already on Armstrong's Map of 1769.

The expansion of the town during the Later Georgian and Early Victorian period was the first substantial development outside the Old Town and calls for a general appraisal of plan structure and forms of growth.

The contrast between composite kernel and accretions has been mentioned previously. The seven constituent plan-units of the Old Town established before 1620 were affected differentially by processes of filling up and of substitu- tion withifi a framework of traditional outlines, except in the north, where they suffered actual contraction.

On the other hand, the accretions represent successive new additions to the

built-up area and are plan-units of new type. In some respect they had their forerunners in the two arterial ribbons of the pre-Georgian period. In terms of land use they were of mixed character, including some industries, public utilities and community buildings. Residences, however, predominated in area as well as in the number of individual plots, and provide the most significant basis for a

quantitative comparison over successive periods.

TABLE II

Residential Development outside the Old Town, c. 1750-1956

Houses Area

Period Number % of Acreage % of Average total total gross density*

c. 1750-1851 155 9.26 36.49 17.46 4.3

1851-1875 47 2.82 10.98 5.27 4.3 1875-1897 110 6.56 15.19 7.28 7.2 1897-1914 192 11.50 37.82 18.08 5.1

1918-1939 655 39.15 56.55 27.13 11.6 1945-1956 514 30.71 51.76 24.78 9.9

c. 1750-1956 1673 100.00 208.79 100.00 8.0

* Residential gross density = number of houses per acre of built-up area including roads.

Table II illustrates the development of the last two hundred years and its steadily increasing rate. Relevant factors are the modest growth of population

E

54 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

during the Agricultural Revolution and the steady filling-up of the old borough area. The low average gross density for the first hundred years is partly due to a characteristic prominence of large houses in their own grounds, but it conceals great contrasts in building development. Table III shows these in terms of individual plan-units and together with similar tables for the later periods pro- vides a basis for the quantitative study of residential accretions.

TABLE III Residential Development outside the Old Town, c. 1750-1851

Ref. to Area Date Number of Acreage Gross Fig. 21 (Plan-unit) houses density

Pts. 27 Hotspur Street - Hotspur Pts.41 P1. (pt.) 1774-1851 34 0.95 35.7

Pt. 40 Croft Place (pt.) 1827-1851 5 0.14 35.7 Pt. 35 Howick Street (S. side, pt.) 13

.3 (Fig. 15f) 1827-1851 37 66.3 1.49 11.3 24.8 Pt. 35 Howick Street (N. side)

(Fig. 15f) 1827-1851 27 1.57 17.1

38 South Street (Fig. 15a) 1827-1851 11 1.60 6.9 Pt. 37 Percy T.- Prudhoe Street 1 36 L 5.55

West (pt.) 1774-1851 12 23.1% 1.80 15.1% 6.7 31 Grosvenor T. - Clive T. 1774-1827 13J 2.15J 6.1

Pt. 23 Dispensary Cottage 1774-1827 1 0.30' 3.3 98 Belvedere T. (Fig. 15h) 1827-1851 5 1.63 3.1

Pt. 23 Barndale House and Cottage 1774-1851 2 1.37 1.5

Pt. 26 Greenbatt Cottage 1827-1851 1 0.77 26.79 1.3

Pt. 52 Clive House and Cottage* 1774-1851 2 16 51.83 7367 1.1 101 Alnbank-Freelands 1827-1851 2 10 5.13 73.6% 0.4 56 Bellevue* 1774-1827 1 4.23 0.2 62 Croft House* 1774-1827 1 4.61 0.2

129 Swansfield House* (Fig. 15g) pre-1769 1 6.92 0.1

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT c. 1750-1851 155)100% 36.49) 100% 4.3 In Tables III, V, VI, VII, X and XI the reader is referred to Figure 21 for the location of plan-

units and to Figures 15 and 19 for specimen plans. * In the case of large houses, subsidiary dwellings such as gate lodges, coachmen's houses, etc., have been disregarded for the purpose of density calculation.

To allow the density features of Late Georgian development to be seen against the background of Alnwick's subsequent expansions, Table IV gives the comparison with later periods for which separate development tables are produced in later chapters.

On the basis of gross densities residential development can be convention- ally divided into groups and classes by certain density limits at which the

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 55

TABLE IV

Incidence of Residential Gross Densities outside the Old Town, c. 1750-1956

Gross density c. 1750-1851 1851-1875 1875-1897 1897-1914 1918-1939 1945-1956 (Table III) (Table V) (Table VI) (Table VII) (Table X) (Table XI)

Groups Classes Limits

XI 41.5 D --40-

X 35.7 twice -30-

IX 24.8 28.5 25.0 twice C -- 22- ___ ____

19.8 20.8 19.2 VIII 17.1 18.0 17.6

. .- - 16- __ __ --_-____

15.7 15.1 14.7 14.5

14.3 14.4 VII 13.7 14.2 14.1

13.3 12.8 12.9 12.4 12.0

-12- -_

11.1 11.4 B 10.7 10.7 twice

10.5 10.6 VI 10.2 10.0

9.1 9.0 9.4 9.8 8.5 8.0 twice

-8- 6.9 6.7 7.4 6.7 6.1 6.1 6.1 5.3 5.5

V 5.1 5.0 5.1 4.8 4.6 4.5 4.2

"--4--. 3.8 3.6

IV 3.3 3.6 3.2 twice 3.1 3.0 3.1

2.1 2.1 2.4 ____*-2-

1.5 1.8 1.5 III 1.3 1.2 twice

A 1.1 ______*-1-.

II 0.9 0.8 0.5 0.6

-0.5- 0.4

I 0.2 twice 0.3 0.2 0.2 0.1

56 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

development tends to change its general character as well as its morphological features. The groups are:

A - Low densities B - Medium densities C - High densities D - Very high densities

They can be subdivided into classes I-XI as shown in Table IV. Two prominent traits of Georgian development are its great range of

densities and the complete lack of representatives in classes VI and VII, i.e. the medium densities around the modem standard limit of twelve houses per acre. Both features in fact emphasize the contrasting picture which opposes the low densities of the larger country houses and the lower medium densities of 'respectable' residential development on the edge of the town to the high and very high densities of artisans' and labourers' dwellings. The gulf is explained by the great disparity of income levels in Georgian society and by the total absence of public control over the design and layout of working-class housing.

The limited extent of high-density housing shown in Table III is due to the very modest industrial development of Alnwick during this period and to the fact that simultaneously with the expansion at the edge of the built-up area, artisan housing increased inside the Old Town. This draws attention to the diversity of growth occurring in the different parts of Alnwick which will now be considered in turn.

Fringe-belt Development Wilkin's Map of 1774 and the contemporary manorial surveys show the

plan of the old borough at a stage of its development little different from that in the late Middle Ages (Fig. 10). A relatively recent right of way, the 'Church Path' following the line of the former town-wall from Clayport to the church, and some replacement of older cottages in the centre by larger Georgian town houses, are obvious changes.

A more significant development, however, is shown in the case of some burgages, the tail-ends of which have been cut off to form new derivative plots with their own dominants, generally smaller than the residual parent plots. They may be distinguished as tail-end plots and adjoin the Church Path, Tower Lane and Green Batt. In other words, a new colonization of burgage garths has begun at those tail-ends where an access lane to give separate frontages is already available. Together with other new plots on or adjoining the same right of way they represent a characteristically varied assortment of land-use units. These are typical late-comers in the town plan, either houses - often small - occupied by people who hold no ancient burgages, or new institutions, or indeed indus- trial land occupied by activities that need more space than is available in a more central position.

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 57

ALNWICK- OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1774 p 0 0 0

SCALE OF FEET 0 0 0 0o0 500

MICHAEL0 0 0 O O O 0 i 0MICHAEL GQ(O(D00Q0000

S ,

CHURCH0 0(00 00000 0 0 0 0 000 0 0 0 0

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 S0 0 0

LITTLE POTTERGA 0 0o CLOJE AIAS . CASTL :

0 (0 0 Do

REEN Barr

PERIPHERAL OPEN SPACES

POT TRGATE TOWER SALLESBURY LAND 12 THE SOUAR TOWERE SCHOOL (FORMERLY SO CALLED 13 TOWER LANE

SMEETING-HOUSE 9 SCHOOL HOUSE 4 TOW HALL

r4 . TON1 4 a

4 9 %

* * E . GA?DE r

G g BUILDINGS OF TRADITIONAL SITING AND/OR BLOCK PLAN

FIGURE 10

58 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

An essential accompaniment of this process is the gradual transformation of the continuous open space outside the line of the town-wall into a ring road. This becomes the 'locus', the backbone for the new plot development. Green Batt, Tower Lane and the later Hotspur Street existed as roads in 1624. Soon after, the stretch between St. Michael's Church and Clayport developed into the 'Church Path'. It is shown on Wilkin's Map running through only partially enclosed waste, but a plan of 181522 shows the stretch between the Bow Burn and Pottergate Tower fully defined by enclosed land as the 'Back Lane', and the whole length appears as a road on Wood's Plan of 1827. Similarly, Northum- berland Street began as part of the Church Path but had become a proper road by the time of the first Ordnance Survey Plans of 1851. Only in the short stretch between Northumberland Street and Narrowgate along the back fence of the tenement plots in Bailiffgate did the ancient town-wall not become an active fixation line with its consequent road. The growth of the Narrowgate burgages here before 1567 had already precluded the development which might otherwise have been expected.

On Wood's Map of 1827, the process associated with this fixation line is seen taken a stage further. It is intensified and affects the fringe of the medieval town more generally (Fig. 11). Industrial sites have increased in number, their distribution still emphasizing their earlier concentration about the old conflu- ence site of the Bow Burn or Stonewell area. Here even tail-end plots of some Fenkle Street burgages are affected because of the medieval layout and its resulting system of occupation lanes. Elsewhere along this fixation line institu- tional buildings have become numerous as have houses.

The Ordnance Survey Plans of 1851 show a still further stage (Fig. 12). On the borough side of the fixation line development has now practically reached saturation, but on the other side are a number of new accretions in the form of institutions and large houses.

Thus, a belt-like distribution of land-use units which for one reason or another seek peripheral location has appeared. It presents a distinctive group, including certain industries, institutions, community services, small houses, and further out isolated larger houses as well as open spaces. They are all topo- graphically associated with town fringes, especially those of longer duration and sharper definition such as old lines of fortification. This phenomenon, of which Alnwick by 1851 furnished a small and not yet consolidated example, is frequently met in urban morphology where towns show more or less annular growth from a compact centre. It was first defined by H. Louis as the urban fringe belt (Stadtrandzone)23 and, although geographically more prominent in the pattern of urban land use, it is of equal importance in town-plan structure. The example of Alnwick, however, enables us to take the concept of the fringe belt a stage further by recognizing two different parts separated by the fixation line, in this case the line of the former town-wall and its consequent streets. On the borough side, the intramural fringe zone or for short the intramural is associated with secondary building development on tail-end plots within an

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 59

already established plan-unit. A generally smaller, more compact plan 'grain' depending on the pre-existing burgage pattern as its frame is a distinctive feature here. The extramural, on the other hand, has developed by way of accretion with greater freedom of space in the wider frame of an earlier field pattern. It differs from its intramural counterpart in the generally larger size of plots and more open arrangement. The whole fringe belt appears then as a continuous contact zone between the area of filling-up or repletion inside the borough and the area of accretion outside. It belongs to both, divided morpho- logically but united functionally by its fixation line on which the plots are orientated for their major access and which has ensured its extent as an un- broken ring zone. It may be called a closed fringe belt, and as a geographical unit of Alnwick it forms the Inner Fringe Belt.

From the beginning, the extramural also encircled the Old Town on the north side although the town-wall was absent. Here Alnwick Castle and its grounds are, of course, much the largest and most dominant fringe feature. During the Georgian period the park increased at the expense of the old borough and by 1851 extended round the north-east side along the old Allerburn Lane within a few yards of Bondgate Tower and Bondgate Without. In the north-west St. Michael's Church and its churchyard represents another ancient unit of the extramural. Here the physical separateness of Canongate and Walkergate from the rest of the town has always been evident. Already before 1850 the new gasworks consolidated the Inner Fringe Belt as a zone separating Canongate and Bailiffgate. Between the church and the Peth near the castle the closes bounding the Bailiffgate area on its north side, and recorded in all the manorial surveys as Hunter's Croft, came into the possession of the Dukes of Northumberland during the eighteenth century. They have been preserved and complete the extramural of the town on this side.

One phenomenon connected with the extramural is of special interest. In the south the Howick Street area is a complete plan-unit that does not form part of the fringe belt. Yet in its northern part, which developed between 1827 and 1851, it shows traits that differ from those of the rest of the unit and can be explained only as fringe-belt features (Figs. 12 and 15f). The part nearest to Green Batt is dominated by rather large plots. These represent an early nine- teenth-century tannery (1 in Fig. 15f) and Grove Cottage (2) both of which ante- date the Howick Street plan-unit, a coach factory (3) and immediately to the east of it the Mechanics Institute, both of which formed part and parcel of the developing plan-unit. Otherwise it was mainly residential. Clearly, the loca- tion of the factory and the institute was conditioned by the fact that this was then part of the town fringe and near Green Batt, the most convenient general line of access from the more populated parts of the town. As the Howick Street plan-unit began to develop in the north it produced spontaneously these new fringe-belt features. Smaller ones, more organically connected with the pre- dominant housing, followed in the direction of Lisburn Street but beyond that the fringe-belt influence petered out and the plan-unit became exclusively

60 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

F --__ ______________

ALNWICK- OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1827

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) COPUNITY AND INSTITUTIONAL BUILDINGS AND THEIR ACCESSORIES

COTTAGEO

(c) DWELLINGHOUSES WITH OR WITHOUT SHOPS AND THEIR ACCESSORIES

RAFF BUILDINGS DEOLISHED BETWEEN29 1774 AND 827

FIXATION LINE OF INNER RINE BELT

PERIPHERAL OPEN SPACES CRETED BETWEEN 1774 AND 1827

(-- INTRA- AND EXTRAMURAL LIMITS OP INNER PRINCE BELT

A BONDELLATE WITHOUT ST. THICHAELS LANTE CROWN YARD K UNION COURT

B CANONGATE B TOWER LANE H KING'S ARMS YARD L WHITE HART YARD C HOTSPUR PLACE F CORRECTION HOUSE YARD J E

UEENS HEAD YARD C HOTSPUR PLACE F CORRECTION HOUSE YARD J QUEEN'S HEAD YARD FIGURE 11

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 61

residential. This interpenetration of the belt and an adjoining accretionary plan-unit is a kind of fringe-belt aureole somewhat reminiscent of the geologist's contact aureole.

A major aspect of the extramural concerns fringe-belt components which originated in the surrounding countryside at such a distance from the fixation line that they lost direct topographical contact with the latter more or less. Although morphographically this dispersed urban development represents a separate form of accretionary growth which does not contribute to the 'closure' of the Inner Fringe Belt, it belongs to it functionally as well as in location. It can be distinguished as the discontinuous outer or distal extramural from the more continuous inner or proximal extramural. The distinction is significant as these two parts were affected quite differently by the subsequent growth of the town.

The original fringe belt thus displays a kind of asymmetric structure. A close 'backbone' composed of intramural and proximal extramural has attached to it unilaterally a much broader and less defined dispersion zone representing the distal extramural. Figure 13 shows this peculiar arrangement as it applied to the Inner Fringe Belt until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Fringe-belt development within the distal extramural consisted of isolated plots or groups of plots distributed over the surrounding countryside and colonized generally by some form of land use other than agriculture. Some of these were to be reached by, or even engulfed in, the later expansion of the town. A prerequisite of their emergence was the continued enclosure of the open fields to the south-east of the town and their transfer to private owners. This process is already noticeable on Mayson's Map of 1624, but appears completed on Thompson's Map of 1760, when the whole area was in closes belonging to different persons, the new field boundaries following those of the ancient furlongs only in part and forming the general frame for development (Fig. 9). At that time buildings dispersed among these closes were very few (Fig. 13) and included such diverse units as a farm, a turnpike cottage and a

FIGURE 11--Alnwick - Old Town and Inner Fringe Belt in 1827.

Inns: 1 Anchor. 2 Angel. 3 Black Swan. 4 Blue Bell. 5 Crown. 6 George and Dragon. 7 Grey's. 8 Half Moon. 9 King's Arms.

10 Nag's Head. 11 Queen's Head. 12 Star. 13 Three Tuns.

14 Turk's Head. 15 White Hart. 16 White Swan.

Chapels: 17 Bethel Chapel. 18 Methodist Chapel. 19 Sion Chapel. 20 Unitarian Chapel.

Public Premises: 21 Shambles and Assembly

Rooms.

22 Bondgate Tower. 23 Dispensary. 24 Engine House. 25 Freemen's Rigg. 26 House of Correction. 27 Pinfold. 28 Poor House. 29 Stone Well. 30 Town Hall.

Industries: 31 Breweries. 32 Carrier's Warehouse. 33 Tanneries.

62 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

ALNWICK- OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1851

0 0 0Q

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C HOTSPUR PLACE IF CORRECTION HOUSE YARD J OLD CHAPEL LANE M TEASDALE'S YARD P WHITE HART YARD

FIGURE 12

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 63

large residence. The latter, Swansfield House, was the first Georgian country- seat of Alnwick, taking its name from the ancient close in which it was erected. It exhibits all the typical features of a Georgian country mansion (Fig. 15g).

During the first half of the nineteenth century, increased agricultural prosperity and the improvement of transport added considerably to the number and variety of houses scattered around Alnwick. Apart from some farm cottages, there were substantial Late Georgian residences with less private open space about them than Swansfield House. Even so the residential density of these properties was rarely more than 0.5 and their building coverage, i.e. the percentage of plot area covered by buildings, generally below 3.5.

Functionally, these residences in open country were parts of the urban fringe belt: houses of prosperous owners who sought the outskirts in order to have spacious rural surroundings and at the same time convenient access to the town. Indeed, all of them had more or less direct road connections with the Old Town, though only Croft House by means of its own long drive com- municated with the fixation line of the fringe belt where its lodge was built in the romantic style of Georgian 'Gothick' revivalism.

Somewhat less spaciously laid out are houses of the same period such as Barndale Cottage on Howling Lane and Spring Gardens on South Road. The latter in fact was really an agricultural residence in the midst of its nursery grounds forming a large plot as part of the ancient furlong of Blindwell Flat. Distinct from all these dispersed dwellings was the Late Georgian Belvedere Terrace. As a row of unified design, i.e. a terrace in the technical sense, it consisted of five houses laid out with a pattern of corresponding strip-plots in open country on part of yet another old furlong, the Goose Flat (Fig. 15h).

FIGURE 12-Alnwick - Old Town and Inner Fringe Belt in 1851.

Inns: 1 Anchor. 2 Angel. 3 Blue Bell. 4 Clayport Tower. 5 Crown and Glove. 6 Fleece. 7 Freemen's Arms. 8 George. 9 Globe.

10 Green Dragon. 11 Grey's. 12 Half Moon. 13 King's Arms. 14 Masons Arms. 15 Nag's Head. 16 Queen's Head. 17 Star. 18 Three Tuns. 19 Turk's Head. 20 White Hart.

Chapels: 21 Bethel Chapel. 22 United Presbyterian

Chapel. 23 Sion Meeting House. 24 Union Presbyterian

Church. 25 Unitarian Chapel. 26 Wesleyan Methodist

Chapel.

Public and Commercial Premises:

27 Assembly Rooms and Shambles.

28 Bondgate Tower. 29 Correction House. 30 Court House. 31 Engine House. 32 Industrial School.

33 Lambton & Co.'s Bank. 34 Library. 35 Mechanics Institute. 36 Militia Depot. 37 Post Office. 38 Savings Bank. 39 Stone Well. 40 Town Hall.

Industries: 41 Breweries. 42 Coach Factories. 43 Maltsters. 44 Tanneries and Skinneries.

Other Premises: 45 Bailiffgate House. 46 Croft House Lodge. 47 Grove Cottage. 48 Riding School.

64 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

With the houses and their yards backing on to a service alley or mews forming the boundary of the whole land-use unit so that the garden spaces are strictly between the houses and the road at the front, the arrangement of this group represents a distinct and familiar variant of the Georgian terrace. The residen- tial gross density here was 3.1, the building coverage 13.5.

Apart from Alnwick Moor and Hulne Park, which as permanent open spaces are in a way distal fringe features, the remaining dispersed development up to the middle of the nineteenth century were new institutions: the Union Workhouse (1841), once larger than its present residue, and the first railway station (1849). The site of the workhouse was carved out of the ancient close of South Field or Hall Flat, a part of the demesne lands. Its shape was condi- tioned by the configuration of the north end of that field following the head valley of the Aller Burn though its boundaries coincided with those of the old close only along the frontage of Wagonway Road, an ancient field lane already accurately shown on Mayson's Map of 1624. This road received its name from a wagonway which ran parallel to it on its east side and served to transport coal from Shilbottle Colliery to Alnwick till superseded by the railway. The railway station with its sidings, being a branch terminus, could be brought relatively near to the town by siting it in the angle between South Road and Wagonway Road on land allowing for moderate expansion, some of it again demesne land.

Both the workhouse and the railway station came very close to the built-up area of the Bondgate ribbon and are clearly land-use units with fringe-belt location, as is the open space round the Percy Tenantry Column of 1816 which was erected on the old close of Cooper Hill. Moreover, the Tithe Map of 1846 and the Ordnance Survey of 1851 show other typical fringe features, in the form of nursery grounds and allotment gardens.

If one adds all these units to the earlier outliers of the Inner Fringe Belt such as Clive House, Bellevue and Croft House, the whole broken zone of the distal extramural round the south side of the town looks in location and ad- mixture of land-use types like an emerging new fringe belt of the Early Victorian period. It owed this character partly to its more distant position, which allowed undeveloped fields and accretions of a very different kind to intervene between it and the Inner Fringe Belt. These accretions were much more compact and organized plan-units, extensions of the town practically void of fringe features. The new fringe belt can also be identified as a growing zone combining new components and earlier ones. The latter had formed the distal extramural of the Inner Belt in the Late Georgian period, but they were now appropriated by the new or Intermediate Fringe Belt. They were translated from the one to the other without changing their site. Croft House illustrates the mechanism of

fringe-belt translation. Beginning as a distal prong of the Inner Fringe Belt, it became contiguous and indeed internal to the Intermediate Belt, and in modern tim es has been cut off from the Inner Belt and from its former lodge by the building development on Prudhoe Street.

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Both belts were to show important morphological differences that become apparent in their subsequent growth.

The Repletion of the Old Town

Although the partial filling-up of the ancient burgages with new buildings originated entirely as fringe-belt development on tail-end plots, it remained by no means confined to the intramural. By 1827 the process is seen to be well under way further inside the borough, though with different intensity in the three street-blocks surrounding the Central Triangle (Fig. 11). In the block between Bondgate and the Castle Grounds the stimulus of a 'back lane' and generally of accessibility to the outside was missing. The only additional build- ings here appear to be a few back-to-back houses in the yards to the north-west and on Greenwell Lane.

On the west side of the town in the three blocks separated by Bailiffgate and Pottergate internal filling-up, apart from fringe-belt additions, showed a similar stage and complexion. Back-to-back houses and the plot accessories of inn yards - natural enough in the heyday of the stage coach - predominated in the rear of the few burgages affected by this development.

In contrast to all these blocks, the southern street-block showed much more rear colonization by plot dominants, with the corollary of greater sub- division of the original burgages. In most cases this involved multiple transverse division to such an extent that the residual parent plot at the burgage head was little, if at all, larger than the row of derivative plots behind it. This in turn resulted in many of the 'yards' becoming recognized public rights of way and in one case virtually a road between the main streets on the north and Green Batt on the south. The new medialplots, i.e. derivative plots developing in the middle of each burgage between the burgage head and the tail-end, were generally much smaller than the original parent burgages. They needed these longitudinal lines of communication since they had no other access to either the main street or Green Batt. They are, therefore, quite distinct from the tail-end plots front- ing Green Batt and belonging to the Inner Fringe Belt, and the difference is clearly shown by the orientation of the respective plot dominants, the houses of the tail-end plots always facing the ring road of the Inner Fringe Belt while the houses on medial plots invariably face the internal right of way or 'yard'.

This development, foreshadowed on Wilkin's Map, created a whole series of footpaths. They did not represent an addition to the street-system proper, as they did not generally develop into streets suitable for all kinds of traffic. The residual townscape in this quarter today shows all stages of development from a narrow, virtually unmade footpath to a fully surfaced street with road- way, kerb and at least one pavement. In no case, not even that of St. Michael's Lane, was there any formation of new separate street-blocks such as had been associated with the market colonization, because each right of way reached the main road only by an archway under the old burgage dominant. At most, such

66 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

a system of internal footpaths and lanes may be called a pseudo-street system. These rights of way were necessary concomitants of the internal colonization of individual or amalgamated burgages by new land-use units, since this growth occurred separately within each unit of landownership. The advantageous position of the southern street-block between the main streets on the north and Green Batt on the south promoted this form of development by individual owners. In addition to the newcomers in the southern fringe belt, then, there were others farther inside the block, among them no less than four Nonconformist chapels as well as the new House of Correction and some back-to-back houses.

The process just described may be called repletion and is of general morpho- logical importance in old towns. In Alnwick it clearly is not restricted to the intramural zone of the Inner Fringe Belt. A pre-existing plan, in this case a medieval one with a traditional burgage pattern, becomes the frame for a process of filling-up which does not add a new street-plan but follows the 'grain' of an already established plan-unit without disturbing the general features of its organization or pattern. Among its chief traits are derivative plots with new plot dominants, fitting into the pattern of parent plots. Such repletion is distinct from both the market concretions discussed earlier and the external accretions of the town.

The Ordnance Survey Map of 1851 shows this development somewhat intensi- fied (Fig. 12). In the southern street-block, another church and the Savings Bank, together with further back-to-back houses and other cottages, increased the congestion. Some of the repletion, however, was related directly to Green Batt, contributing thereby to the consolidation of the Inner Fringe Belt. The new houses fronting Green Batt were rather larger than the cottages in the 'yards', thus emphasizing the difference in character between internal and fringe- belt repletion.

Similar developments are observable in the western street-block behind Fenkle Street. Here the same intensity of repletion characterized Pottergate Place as well as Union Court and the nearby Teasdale's Yard, with a varied assortment of cottages, back-to-back houses, workshops, etc. Accordingly, Pottergate Place and Union Court became internal rights of way joining the earlier lane system of the Stonewell area.

Repletion also occurred in the small blocks round the market. During the first half of the nineteenth century they became completely consolidated in their plot pattern, so that by 1851 all plot boundaries were defined by walls or fences. The building coverage on the average was then well over 85 per cent owing to the addition of sheds and outhouses in the rear, the plots being too small to accommodate additional dwellings or other dominants.

In contrast, repletion in the old borough was generally associated with the erection of back-to-back houses. It produced a common phenomenon in English urban morphology: the slums of smaller towns, less obtrusive perhaps than those of Glasgow or Birmingham and easily overlooked by the casual visitor, but nevertheless a real problem.

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 67

As a general feature of the small to medium-sized market town they are of considerable importance and warrant closer investigation. Teasdale's Yard in Fenkle Street, West Row, will serve as a representative example (Fig. 14). It attracted the particular attention of Rawlinson who, in his Report to the General Board of Health in 1849, recorded no less than seventeen cases of cholera within this burgage, five of them fatal, and mapped its building arrange- ment and utilization.24

In 1774 the burgage belonged to George Selby, a well-known attorney and respected member of an important Alnwick family, 2 and showed the traditional medieval arrangement of a long strip-plot. The burgage head was occupied by a dwelling-house as plot dominant and a yard with some plot accessories. Behind it, a further yard and a long 'garth' or garden unencumbered by build- ings formed the burgage tail. The whole was defined by fences or walls and had a building coverage of 14.7. The dwelling-house was of simple traditional oblong plan and with its neighbours on adjoining burgages formed a row. The burgage on its north side had much the same appearance, but the neighbouring plot to the south was exceptional in that it comprised an inn and therefore contained many more plot accessories, the inn 'yard' spreading over the whole garth.

By 1827 the burgage had come into the ownership of a Mr. Teasdale."2 By that time, its building development had doubled since 1774 and now reached a coverage of 34.8. It seems to have contained already some of the back-to-back houses which were such a notorious feature through most of the plot's sub- sequent history.

By 1849 the development had almost doubled again compared with that of 1829 and with a coverage of 62.9 left no open space except a very narrow alley and yard."' Much of this repletion was effected by the earliest back-to-back houses. They were one or two storeys high and were built as single rows with their back walls on the burgage boundary and therefore generally had no windows on that side. Each room was let as a separate tenement, occupied at night by from eight to twenty people on a floor-space of from 100 to 250 sq. feet.2 Rawlinson's report does not give details about the tenants of the back- to-back houses in Teasdale's Yard. His information about Moore's Yard off Pottergate in the same street-block suggests, however, that the sudden increase in the number of back-to-back houses in the yards of Alnwick was largely asso- ciated with the immigration of people from the Irish countryside then ravaged by the potato famine. These tenants were all paupers 'largely engaged in bone and rag collecting'. In two cases marked '1' and '2' on the '1849' plan of Figure 14, the upper storeys of the back-to-back houses were used for the purposes of a Ragged School. For the rest burgage repletion had resulted in a congested jumble of back-to-back houses, workshops, middens, and minor accessories. The trades tended to occupy the rear portions of the burgage, being orientated towards the backgate and so to the nearby fringe belt. It is to be noted that in this example the derivative plots have shrunk to become

68 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

TEASDALE'S YARD (FENKLE STREET) 1774-1956

MR. GEO. SELBY ATTOR. _j

177

MR. TEASDALE

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10 O0 100 200 3 0

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C COALHOUSES OR MORE ROOMS S STABLE,WITH LOFT OVER

CH COACH-HOUSe CR GROCER'S SHOP AND OFFICE, SM SMITHY

CM CANDLEMAKER'S WORKSHOP WITH DWELLING OVER TE SINGLE - ROOM TENEMENT

CW CARYWRIGHT'S WORKSHOP P PRIVY W WASH- HOUSEWITH SCHOOL OVER - PH PUBLIC HOUSE L LUMBER- HOUSE

GROUND-FLOOR BUILDING USES IN 1849:

DWELLINCS OUT-HOUSES LIMIT OF TWO-STOREY BUILOGS. $HOPI AND WORKSHOPS E COVERED PASSAGES MIDDENS

FIGURE 14

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 69

individual buildings only. They do not carve up the parent burgage completely, but leave a 'yard' space which forms their undivided line of access and may sometimes accommodate functions subsidiary to those carried on in adjoining buildings.

The building types, kinds of building use and general arrangement found here by Rawlinson represent a fairly common form of burgage repletion in English market towns at that time, and they apply to the street-blocks to the west and to the north-east of the Central Triangle. However, a prominent additional feature of repletion in the Market Street/Green Batt block--the appearance of public buildings, mainly Nonconformist chapels --is only partly and rather poorly represented in Teasdale's Yard by the Ragged School. Figure 14 shows that the slum growth of Teasdale's Yard had been completed by 1849.

Besides repletion, replacement of old buildings affected many parts of the Old Town in the period from 1776 to 1851 (Figs. 10, 11, 12)."9 It was very marked in the Bailiffgate area, under strong influence from the castle. Inside the old borough Wilkin's Map already shows a number of large new houses in Fenkle Street, Narrowgate and on the west side of Market Place. Public buildings, as well as the chief coaching inns, were replaced. Some ancient houses, however, were only slightly refashioned by the addition of new Georgian facades.3o At the northern end of Canongate Late Georgian replacement was so extensive that it resulted in the complete obliteration of the earlier plot pattern and therefore amounted to redevelopment (Fig. 7). In adapting itself to the pre- existing street-system with only minor changes of street-line and without the creation of new streets, it presents the distinctive type of adaptive redevelopment.

Arterial Ribbons

In view of the unusual conditions of ownership on the whole north side of Alnwick the only main roads which showed real ribbon development outside the towngates in 1774 were Clayport Street and Bondgate Without (Fig. 8). In both cases it was a distinct type of plan-unit best characterized as the double ribbon, with a series of plots and their buildings on each side of the road. But while the Clayport ribbon preserved an older burgage pattern with long strip- plots and had the compactness of row development observable in the Old Town, the Bondgate ribbon had lost that aspect in its western half. In 1774 its plots, though roughly rectangular, were rather squat. A more chequered history of individual ownership seemed to be indicated by the fact that some parcels were obviously derivative plots from larger parent plots. This imparted an irregu- larity which must have been increased by the influence of the Duke as land- owner, for he tended to sterilize certain frontages on the north side against building, apparently with the intention of extending his grounds in this direction in order to create a new south-eastern approach to the castle." There were other appreciable gaps in the building development of each side. These initial

F

70 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

differences between the Clayport and Bondgate ribbons, combined with other formative factors, in due course led to interesting morphological results.

Although Clayport Street was part of the turnpike road to Rothbury and Hexham, it had not the same importance as the busy Great North Road. In Later Georgian days it tended to develop as a more homogeneous residential area on its outskirts, especially as the very wide road space with its green and an appreciable elevation above the general level of the town added to its amenities. As the actual roadway kept to the south side of Clayport Street, new buildings extended the ribbon behind the green on the north side of the road. Here two residential Regency terraces formed new accretions (1 and 2 in Fig. 8). Beyond them to the west Clive House represented the fringe-belt end of these Late Geor- gian additions. In the mid-nineteenth century, then, the Clayport ribbon con- sisted of two contiguous parts. An older double-sided stretch nearer to the Old Town had homogeneous cottage rows within a burgage pattern only slightly disturbed on the south side by interposition of a back-lane between the yards and the garths. A more recent single-sided ribbon on the north side of Clayport Street attained relative morphological homogeneity by its terrace development and its residential nature (cf. also Figs. 11 and 12).

Unlike the Clayport ribbon, that of Bondgate Without showed no outward extension in Late Georgian and Early Victorian days but a certain measure of consolidation. The irregular structure of the ribbon was underlined already in 1774 by the very broken nature of the two street-lines, plots with front-gardens being intermixed with those which had none, a feature of the ribbon to this day. Irregularity was gradually increased by the heterogeneity of land and building uses attracted here, for Bondgate Without formed part of the Great North Road and became also the direct link between the town and its new railway station. The diversity of landownership further emphasized the feature. Even the advance of the Dukes of Northumberland towards the north front of Bondgate Without made little difference, as it came when some of that front had already been developed and never led to complete possession of the whole of the north side. The extension of the Castle Gardens in this area merely increased the irregularity of the plot pattern by causing an extremely broken alignment of the back fence. This contrasted with the relatively straight back fence of the burgages and plots on the south side of Bondgate Without. Here the old more or less strip-shaped closes shown in this area on Mayson's Map of 1624 (Fig. 9), had been divided by 1774 into a sufficiently deep, though still immature, plot series fronting Bondgate Without and the remainder of the closes to the south. For the most part the latter continued in agricultural use long after the Bondgate series had adopted a more urban complexion."32 Their fragmentation of owner- ship"" and lack of access to existing roads soon caused the developing back fence of Bondgate Without to become an occupation road, the later Dovecot Lane.

Among the buildings attracted to Bondgate Without were a Nonconformist meeting-house, later replaced by the Militia Depot, two inns, and Bondgate Hall, redeveloped in 1810. The remainder of the Bondgate ribbon was largely

LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 71

occupied by rows of dwelling-houses. Two of the Duke's plots on the north side remained unbuilt until after the middle of the nineteenth century, but the importance of Bondgate Without already caused some repletive plot develop- ment before 1850. Allison Place, built before 1827, represented the better residential variant, while Victoria Place was an example of yard repletion by early back-to-back houses.

The only other instance of ribbon development, contiguous with the Inner Fringe Belt but taking place entirely in Later Georgian and Early Victorian days on previously agricultural land, was a single-sided ribbon on the east side of the ancient field-lane leading southward from Green Batt (now Percy Terrace). The morphological frame was supplied by the road and the Easter Piece, a field already enclosed in 1624, but the ribbon developed only on its west side in piecemeal fashion under different ownerships (Fig. 9). The plot pattern is characteristic of the earlier forms of speculative residential development, with relatively shallow rectangular blocks and small terraces in open formation.

Layouts The southern end of the Percy Terrace ribbon already includes in embryonic

form a distinct type of accretionary growth which is very different from the arterial ribbons or from fringe-belt units (Fig. 15a). At the southern end of the Easter Piece a rather deeper parcel of land was available for building, capable of containing more plots of comparable size than could be accommodated on its existing road frontage. It was therefore developed as a single new plan-unit for the accommodation of ten houses and their plots, mostly in small terraces. The required additional road access was provided by South Street, a short cul- de-sac opening up the interior of the whole parcel and functioning solely as a minor residential street with no traffic other than that to adjoining plots. Such a purposeful arrangement or design of buildings, plots, and associated new roads opening up back land is fundamentally different from a ribbon that develops spontaneously along an already existing road without unified design. It constitutes a layout in the technical sense of the town-planner and ushers in the long sequence of residential layouts which have increasingly dominated modern accretions. The South Street layout was small enough to remain entirely orientated on Percy Terrace and looks almost like a part of that ribbon. Yet morphologically it is far more independent than Belvedere Terrace, for example (Fig. 15h).

In general, layouts form rather larger plan-units: essential additions to an urban built-up area distinct from fringe-belt accretions by virtue of their inherent organization and tendency towards compactness. The best example before 1850 is that of the Howick Street/Lisburn Street area in the south (Fig. 15f). Its frame was provided by the Wester Piece, a close appearing on Mayson's Map of 1624 and as a separate ownership unit on subsequent plans (Fig. 9),

72 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK

EARLIER DEVELOPMENT UNITS IN ALNWICK

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LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLY VICTORIAN ALNWICK 73

slightly refashioned in its boundaries by 1827 when Grove Cottage (2 in Fig. 15f) and the adjoining tannery at the north end of the close (1) had already been absorbed by the Inner Fringe Belt. The Wester Piece was developed for building gradually from c. 1830 onwards, beginning in the north, with more than half the area built up by 1850, the whole plan-unit being completed in the south in the early 1880s. The plan has Late Regency and Early Victorian features, with straight streets in rectangular arrangement, standardized, generally small plots, and in some cases back-alleys, the whole built up with terrace houses in closed formation on the street-line or behind shallow front-gardens. Small industries and institutional buildings in the northern part associated with the Inner Fringe Belt increased the already high building coverage considerably (70.6). To the south, however, the unit became entirely residential in Mid-Victorian days, with a building coverage of 57. As a typical feature of these earlier layouts its 'topographical behaviour' is fairly independent, Howick Street running up the steep northern slope of the Alnwick Ridge without much consideration for wheeled traffic (Fig. 4).

East of Green Batt, the Hotspur Place area forms a similar but simpler layout intermediate in size between those at South Street and Howick Street, with a maximum building coverage of 84.2 (Fig. 12).

REFERENCES

1 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 463, 465, 468. Ordnance Survey map of XVII century England. A. ARM- STRONG & SON, A map of the County of Northumberland, etc., 1769. C. & J. GREENWOOD, Map of the County of Northumberland, etc., 1828. N. WEATHERLY, A map of a projected turnpike roadfrom Hag- gerston blacksmith's shop to Alnwick, etc., 1824.

2 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 243. 3 W. DAVISON, A descriptive and historical view of Alnwick, etc. (2nd ed., 1822), 245. 4 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 365-6. 5 DAVISON, op. cit., 240-6. 8 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 70-101, 221-4. DAVISON, op. cit., 236.

7 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 227-9. 8 Ibid., vol. i, 471; vol. ii, 219-20. 9 Ibid., vol. ii, 207, 218. 10 Ibid., 162-206. 11 Ibid., 153. 12 Ibid., vol. i, 468-71; vol. ii, 224. 13 Ibid., vol. i, 448; but cf. W. DAVISON, op. cit., 189, for critical comment. 14 TATE, op. cit., vol. ii, 284-8. 15 Ibid., 400. 16 Ibid., vol. i, 353-8. 17 Ibid., 358, 364-7. D. STROUD, Capability Brown (1950), 140-1, 160. Is W. W. TOMLINSON, The North-Eastern Railway (1914), 483, 507. 19 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 462. 20 Ibid., vol. ii, 368. 21 Ibid., vol. i, 462. Cf. also Thompson's Map, 1760 showing the old bridge and Wilkin's Map

1774, showing the 'New Bridge'. 22 R. TATE, Ground plan andprofile of levels, etc., 1815. 23 H. Louis, op. cit., 147. 24 R. RAWLINSON, op. cit., 28, and plan of Teasdale's Yard (scale 1 : 240).

74 LATER GEORGIAN AND EARLIER VICTORIAN ALNWICK

25 TATE, Op. cit., vol. ii, 412. Foul terrier to Alnwick (Terrier to Wilkin's Map, 1774), plot No. 156 in 'Finkle Street Westside.'

26 WOOD'S Plan of Alnwick (1829). 27 RAWLINSON, op. cit., plan of Teasdale's Yard. 28 Ibid., 22, giving particulars of Moore's Yard which are comparable to those of Teasdale's

Yard. 29 W. DAVISON, op. cit., 188, says of Alnwick that it was on the whole well built, that the houses

were constructed mostly of freestone and had 'a noble appearance', and that the thatched houses were rapidly disappearing and giving place to others 'which approach to elegance'.

30 E.g. the 'Red House' in Narrowgate, now Messrs. Forster & Son. 3x In Figure 8: 5, 6, 7, the plot to the south-east of the latter, 9 and the plot immediately to the

north-west of that. Cf. Figure 9. 32 'Nursery Grounds' in fringe-belt location are shown on the Ordnance Survey 1/528 (1851 and

1866), Sheets 6 and 8. -- J. ROBERTSON, A plan of that part of Stony Hills, etc. belonging to Madm. Elizabeth Grey, 1732;

Thompson's Map, 1760; Wood's Map, 1827.

CHAPTER 7

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

Alnwick as a Rural Service Centre

HELPED in a small way by the construction of the railway line (1887) to Wooler and Coldstream,' Alnwick consolidated its position as a small market and service centre in the Victorian period, and it had few industries needing larger premises than the traditional workshop.2 Among these were brewing, tanning, coach-building and an iron foundry. From 1872 onwards, the manufacture of fishing tackle, peculiarly connected with the name of the town, developed steadily from small beginnings, till it has come to claim a world market with its high-class products. The market function of Alnwick was emphasized in the erection of a corn exchange in 1862,- and an auction mart in 1880 near the railway station. If Alnwick attracted no major industries, it did accumulate some service industries, such as new and larger gasworks4 and abattoirs.

The establishment of the Local Board of Health in 1851 inaugurated development of Local Government institutions, the new offices of the Local Authority being built in 1877.5 A new court-house had been erected in 1856,6 and a new cemetery was laid out at the same time and enlarged repeatedly.7 Schools increased considerably in size and number towards the end of the nineteenth century. Public baths, a drill hall and hospitals were other institu- tions added before the First World War.

The modest increase in industries and the provision of new utility and social services, some of them of regional importance, brought about some slight increase in population, but in 1911 the total was still only seven thousand.

The advent of Public Health legislation made many of the existing working- class dwellings obsolete. It was mainly responsible for the appearance of new types of houses and plan-units, especially through the Public Health Act of 1875 which resulted in the enormous spread of the 'tunnel-back' house in terrace formation along what has become known as 'bye-law streets'. In this way, the built-up area of Alnwick was increased appreciably by a number of small housing schemes. At the other end of the social scale, the prosperity of the town found expression in a fair number of larger residences, standing in their own grounds, especially to the east and south-east.

The effects of these economic and social improvements are expressed in the town plan of Alnwick in four different forms. The Old Town continued to experience repletive growth on the ancient burgages, accompanied by some replacements. Fringe-belt development increased at its periphery and beyond it on the margin of the Early Victorian town. Adjoining open land to the south and south-east was available for accretions in the shape of layouts and ribbons. Elsewhere the open country became subject to a continuation of dispersed

75

76 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

ALNWICK-OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1897

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c E D 2(c) DWELLINGHOUSES WITH OR ET o CE(8) HOUT SHOPS AND THEIR ACCESSORIESo(8 ) 9 Y ** FIXATION LINE OF INNER FRINGE BELT

FIGURE 16

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK 77

development in the shape of relatively large plot units, generally in association with existing roads.

Repletion and Replacement in the Old Town

The example of Teasdale's Yard shows how those burgages in the Old Town which had reached saturation point in their building development by the middle of the nineteenth century experienced very little change in Mid- and Late Victorian days. Most burgages reached their maximum in this period, but it would be wrong to assume that the general causes underlying the process affected all of them uniformly (Figs. 16 and 17). The pseudo-burgages of the market area, and a few of the ancient deep burgages, had already been fully built up by 1851. For the great majority of the larger burgages the maximum of building congestion, though Victorian, varied greatly according to the individual circumstances of each site. Among these, size and position were most important. Small plots such as the pseudo-burgages of the eastern market area or some old derivative plots elsewhere reached a building coverage of as much as 90.

Larger burgages generally tended to be less congested. Of the three series surrounding the Central Triangle, that in the north-east, lacking the accessory stimulus of a back-lane and built-up land beyond, showed the largest amount of open ground, generally on the burgage tails. In the absence of derivative plots, the climax of building coverage in this area was usually effected by the addition of plot accessories connected with an established building use in the plot domi- nant at the burgage head. A representative example is provided by the rear extensions of the White Swan Hotel.

The southern burgage series, on the other hand, backed by Green Batt and lying more in the direction of further urban growth, became more heavily and evenly saturated to show congestion similar to that of Teasdale's Yard. Exten- sive subdivision into derivative plots, with its resultant heterogeneity of build- ing uses and shapes, was the rule in this area. The Victorian climax was reached here largely by the addition of industrial or commercial buildings, either independently on medial plots or in conjunction with frontage uses on Market Street. The Corn Exchange in the eastern half of the block is a notable example of the first kind, the Baths in the western half of the second.

The western street-block, with a system of back-lanes more recently and less advantageously developed round the west end of Stonewell Lane, was inter- mediate in the character of its Victorian repletion. The burgage series along Clayport Street experienced considerable back-yard colonization with back-to- back houses and outhouses and showed congestion similar to that of the adjoin- ing Teasdale's Yard and Angel Inn Yard, and the building coverage of some burgages reached 65 per cent. Farther north the Drill Hall was an accessory to the plot dominant in Fenkle Street, the H.Q. of the Northumberland Fusiliers. Otherwise the burgages fronting Fenkle Street retained their garths as open spaces. Only one burgage immediately north of the Drill Hall reached a building

78 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

coverage of 63.6 per cent in 1886-87 owing to yard colonization by dwelling- houses of a layout which only just managed to comply with the new building bye-laws after 1875.

In the street-block on the north side of Pottergate some repletion took place, but on the north side of Bailiffgate there was practically no extra building throughout the Victorian period, and in the Walkergate/Canongate area there was some clearance. In Walkergate, where considerable demolition had occurred earlier, further clearance was slight and piecemeal. In Canongate, on the other hand, the old abbey borough with its two rows of cottages was largely demolished after 1866, together with the old gasworks. In its place adaptive redevelopment occurred from 1885 to 1909 at the southern end near the church, with the building of some dwelling-houses designed in an improved estate fashion for the Duke of Northumberland. It showed more intricate block-plans on small plots in open formation as a mixture of detached, semi-detached, and terrace houses.

Differences in the repletive growth of the arterial ribbons during the Mid- and Late Victorian period were due to the different position of Clayport Street and Bondgate Without as well as to differences in plot structure (Fig. 8). In the Clayport ribbon, repletion was on the whole moderate. In Bondgate Without, growth was not only relatively larger but more varied morphologically and affected a number of plot dominants. On the south side, Hardy's gun and fishing-tackle factory was completely rebuilt in 1889, and in the three subsequent decades the works expanded greatly at the back spreading ultimately over the rear parts of no less than four adjoining plots. This is, therefore, an interesting case of a land-use unit fixed to its rather limited site by replacement at the front, a circumstance natural enough in this particular type of industry. Subsequently, it overcame site resistance by repletive absorption. The plot east of Bondgate Hall also experienced replacement, resulting in a change of position of the plot dominant, a dwelling-house, from its frontal row position to a detached one in the middle of the plot in 1904. On the north side of Bondgate Without, frontage development had been incomplete in early Victorian days, two intermediate plots having been left undeveloped by the Duke of Northumberland. They received their first plot dominants between 1866 and 1883, a Methodist chapel and an adjoining detached house in the one case and a pair of 'tunnel-back' houses in the other. This development differs from repletion in that it does not take place on already developed plots as a further internal filling-up. It represents in- dependent but retarded growth associated with unbuilt land left in an otherwise built-up plan-unit which it completes, and may be called complementary building development. It often creates a sharp architectural contrast or incongruence in the street-front in which it occurs.

In the older town Victorian and Edwardian replacement of plot dominants on the street-fronts was not extensive and left little mark on the town plan. It was restricted to a few cases in which Georgian row houses were substituted by new commercial building types with a larger block-plan, sometimes entailing

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK 79

ALNWICK- OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1921

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FIGURE 17

80 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

further amalgamation of burgages. In Pottergate, however, the old Presby- terian church was replaced by a very much larger successor in 1894 and an accessory church hall. More prominent was the extensive replacement and refashioning of structures in and around the castle about the middle of the nineteenth century as a result of the great rebuilding scheme of the fourth Duke of Northumberland. This changed the block-plan of buildings considerably on the west side of the ancient keep as well as to the south-west and south of the castle walls."

Fringe-Belt Development Since the pre-Victorian margin of the Old Town coincided with that of the

Victorian period in some places and offered still unbuilt sites, its development in fringe-belt fashion continued.

Along the fixation line of the Inner Fringe Belt changes brought additional small houses as well as new public buildings. In the south-west the building line of Tower Lane was improved in 1867 and recolonized with row houses in the years 1877-83, transforming the 'lane' into a street.

On the west side of Dispensary Street, however, the old fringe belt was extended by larger plots. The greater outward expansion of the fringe belt on this side, linking Barndale House with the proximal extramural, was made possible by unified land ownership, the Duke owning most of the land by 1846 (Fig. 9) and releasing it for public purposes. The field between Barndale House and the bowling green was now completely encircled by fringe-belt elements but has remained in agricultural use as residual land of the 'Bamdale Riggs'. Farther south the group of industrial plots in the Stonewell area increased in extent as well as in building coverage. Here the back-lanes communicating with Dispensary Street attracted some large building units on tail-end plots, including an iron foundry and the Assembly Hall (1886), thus consolidating the peculiar inward extension of the intramural initiated in the previous period.

It has been shown earlier that the workhouse and the railway station had fringe location in respect of the Bondgate ribbon and formed in fact part of a new, though less well defined, Intermediate Fringe Belt (Fig. 13). This feature was enlarged in the 1880s by extensions to the railway terminus, the advent of the auction mart, the laying-out of a public park about the Percy Tenantry Column, and the building of the new infirmary (1906). Across Denwick Lane the Duke's park with its new elaborate layout merged the new Intermediate with the earlier Inner Belt. To the south of the town some undeveloped closes, once part of Alnwick's ancient South Field, were available for a westward extension of the former. Accordingly belt colonization, earlier initiated with Croft House, proceeded in 1900 with the erection of the new Duke's School. Beyond it, the new allotments on Dunder Hill formed a further component of this zone. The belt continued westward by appropriating units of the former distal extramural, i.e. Bellevue and Clive House. Between the various components of the zone parcels of agricultural land remained here and there.

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK 81

Beyond this Intermediate Fringe Belt of mainly Victorian provenance, and separated from it largely by intervening residential areas, the railway line to Alnmouth, the new cemetery and the new gasworks inaugurated an Outer Fringe Belt. Today this still marks the limit of the built-up area in the south- east. It was largely conditioned by the railway lines, lying in the constricted angle between them and therefore on land less suitable for residential develop- ment, yet with satisfactory road access. The morphological frame was provided mainly by the railway, the main road, and the boundaries of closes derived from ancient furlongs. To the north of the Alnmouth railway between Alnmouth Road and Newcastle Road, the Grove Nursery Grounds (Royal Oak Nursery), now cut off from the Intermediate Belt by newer development and so translated to the Outer Belt, marked the north-eastern end of the latter. About the turn of the century the belt was consolidated by the addition of a laundry and a sawmill on Newcastle Road. On Wagonway Road the fever hospital formed a westward extension.

Besides such residential property as had been translated from the old distal extramural, the Intermediate and Outer Fringe Belts incorporated some new large residences on the east side of the town. Since most of these were ultimately absorbed into accretions of normal residential rather than fringe-belt character, they will be discussed later under Road Ribbons and Dispersed Development.

Already, similarities as well as important differences can be noted between the Inner Fringe Belt and the two outer belts. They become even clearer in the light of post-Victorian development. A common trait, however, is the general sequence of their development. Each began with the town fringe as it was at some definite, even if very short, period and grew in its characteristic fashion over several subsequent periods, notwithstanding the outward shift of the town fringe. It is as if such a belt, once established, created its own environment and imposed its own conditions of further development on its area in terms of shape and size of plots, types of land use, and degree of opening-up by streets.

Further, all the belts shared the steady tendency towards gradual consoli- dation from a broken zone to a compact one. This enables us to distinguish initial, mature and final stages, indicated by the relative amount of agricultural residual, i.e. farmland surrounded by developing built-up areas. By about 1910 the Inner Fringe Belt had virtually reached the final stage of complete compact- ness, whereas the Intermediate Belt was still too disrupted by fields to have attained full maturity, and the Outer Belt was clearly in its initial stage.

Another common feature is the way in which each belt tends to lose its more distal components during the further growth of the built-up area, either by translation to a succeeding belt or by absorption into accretions of a different character.

But there are also differences. The Inner Belt originated from a definite fixation line which had formed the physical boundary of the built-up area for some centuries and at one time was represented structurally on the ground by the town-wall and its gates. This not only involved a close relation of the belt

82 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

to the original built-up area, the fixation line being in direct contact with burgages everywhere, but also resulted in a marked, if incomplete, ring of consequent streets. It established a closed fringe belt, with its lengthwise division into two parallel but structurally different zones, the close-grained repletive intramural and the more open-grained accretionary extramural. The implied asymmetry of this arrangement was emphasized by the existence of the distal extramural until this became subject to piecemeal translation to other belts.

In contrast to this, the younger Intermediate and Outer Fringe Belts showed neither fixation lines nor division into repletive and accretionary zones. From the beginning they were more loosely related topographically to the actual fringe of the contemporary built-up area and they were more discontinuous. Many of the newer types of land use with fringe characteristics might develop anywhere on peripheral open land provided it was within short transport distance from the town. Infact some of these werepurposely sitedto keep them away from built-up areas, e.g. the larger residences, workhouse, cemetery and fever hospital. In the initial stage of belt development here agricultural land was naturally prominent. Surviving in residual form in later stages it increased the general looseness of belt structure. This and the large size of most of the com- ponent land-use units greatly impeded the development of a closely knit street- system within each belt, accessible from and traversable in all directions. The only efficient roads were in fact the pre-existing arterials and field lanes running out from the Old Town and therefore sited transversely to the belts with large gaps between them, quite unlike the ring road of the Inner Belt. It will be seen later how these morphological differences between Inner and Outer Fringe Belts affected the geography of Alnwick's growing built-up area.

The New Residential Accretions in General

Functionally the fringe belts represented a mixture of land uses, but the bulk of accretionary growth in the Victorian and Edwardian era consisted of varied residential development. Its broad quantitative traits can be compared with those of other periods in Table II. Between 1851 and 1914, 349 houses were built, that is about one-fifth of all houses erected outside the Old Town since the Mid-Georgian period, as compared with less than 10 per cent during the previous hundred years. In just over sixty years this growth covered about 64 acres or one-third of the total area as against one-sixth during the preceding hundred years. Within the time span 1851-1914 the pace quickened in each of the three sub-periods, the number of houses jumping roughly from 3 to 7 and then 12 per cent and the acreage similarly from 5 to 7 and 18 per cent. But whereas the average gross density was the same in Mid-Victorian as in Georgian develop- ment, i.e. 4.3, it increased to 7.2 in Late Victorian times and fell to 5.1 in the Edwardian period.

This indicates structural differences brought out further in Tables V, VI and VII in conjunction with Table IV.

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK 83

In the Mid-Victorian period (Table V) the growth of high-density artisan housing continued in the southern part of the Howick Street area, accounting for 83 per cent of houses built. Only 18 per cent of the total area was thus occupied and a few houses with large plots actually covered about 80 per cent of the additional area. The social contrast then was still pronounced, but for the first time medium gross densities appear with a small number of houses on the south side of the town (11.1 and 10.5) which lie more truly in the middle of the whole density scale.

The Late Victorian period (Table VI) shows a considerable absolute, though no relative, increase in working-class housing with high densities. It was conditioned by the minimum standards of space required by the Public Health Act of 1875 and reflected the changes generally characteristic of the period. Hotspur Place East appears with an unusually high gross density, due

TABLE V

Residential Development outside the Old Town, 1851-75

Ref. to Area Date Number of Acreage Gross

Fig. 21 (Plan-unit) houses density

Pt. 35 Howick St. (pt.) and Howick St. 1851-72 39 83% 1.9718.0% 19.8 36 J S.W. (Fig. 15f)

Pt. 40 Croft Place (part) 1851-64 2 4 0.18 0.37 11.1 Pt. 37 Percy T.-Prudhoe St. W. 1851-75 2J8.5% 0.19 3.3% 10.5

Pt. 43 Prudhoe St. East (pt.) 1865 1 0.561 1.8 Pt. 105 Alnmouth Rd. East (pt.) 1874 1 4 1.09 [8.64 0.9

74" Allerburn House, Ravensmede 8.5%0 r78.7 00

102f (Fig. 19e) 1862-70 2 6.99J 0.3

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1851-75 47}100% 10.98}100% 4.3

possibly to subsequent site changes effected by the repletive absorption on the part of Hardy's factory and discussed earlier. The Bridge Street area is more representative in its gross density as well as in its number of houses. It is the first example in Alnwick of the activity of large-scale housing agencies, in this case the Duke of Northumberland. Together with Hotspur Place East and the Gasworks Cottages it more than doubled the working-class housing with high densities, although with 3.9 acres it occupied little more than one quarter of the additional area. Low-density development contributed eight houses on 9.79 acres, or nearly two-thirds of the additional area. All these buildings were large residences on the east side of Alnwick. A distinctive new feature of Late Victorian housing outside the Old Town was the wide spread over the medium densities. It reflects the arrival in small numbers of a variety of new professional and other service occupations when Alnwick developed as a Victorian service centre.

84 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

The broad picture of a wide spread of density classes is retained in the residential accretions of the Edwardian period (Table VII). With eighty-three houses or 43.2 per cent each, however, the high- and medium-density groups now share equally in the absolute increase in new residential accommodation though the medium-density development covers rather more than twice the area occupied by high-density housing. The latter was now largely effected by housing agencies such as the Alnwick Workmen's Building Association, the newly formed Alnwick U.D.C., operating under the new Housing Act of 1890, and the North-Eastern Railway Company. In three cases, i.e. King Street, part

TABLE VI

Residential Development outside the Old Town, 1875-97

Ref. to Area Housing Date Number of Acreage Gross Fig. 21 (Plan-unit) agency houses density

42 Hotspur Pl. E. 1894 17 0.41 41.5 Pt. 111 Gasworks Cottages 1883 4 91 0.14 3.90 28.5

Pt.95} Bridge St. (Fig. 15b) D.o.N'd. 1884-97 70 82.7% 3.35f25.7% 20.8

Pt. 37 Prudhoe St. W. 1881 3 0.19]

15.7 Pt. 36 Howick St. S.W.

(Fig. 15f) 1886 1 0.07 14.3 Pt. V Bondgate Without 11 1.50

(Fig. 8) 1875-97 2 10.0% 0.22 9.9% 9.1 97 Aydon Gardens 1889 3 0.59 5.1

Pt. 80 The Manse 1875-83 1 0.21 4.8 Pt. 40 Croft Place 1895 1 0.22 4.5

(Fig. 15e) 1875-96 6 8 2.88 9.79 2.1 Pt. 105 Alnmouth Rd. E. 1881 1 7.3% 1.94 64.4 % 0.5

103 West Acres (Fig. 19e) 1875-97 1 4.97 0.2

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1875-97 110)100% 15.19) 100 7.2

of the Bridge Street/Duke Street area and a small part of Swansfield Park Road North-East the peculiar North-British variant of the small 'tunnel-back' house, the tunnel-back flat, was adopted. This accommodated two dwellings or 'flats' in each house instead of one. The considerable relative increase in medium- density housing continued and emphasized the trend already observed in the Victorian service centre. Low-density accommodation increased absolutely as well as relatively, representing 13.6 per cent of the additional accommodation on two-thirds of the additional area. It indicates the residential needs of the few manufacturers and other prosperous people who built the large houses on the east side of Alnwick with gross densities below 2. Together with the increased

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK 85

medium-density housing it was responsible for lowering the average gross density during the Edwardian period.

New Layouts The preceding analysis indicates the general importance and variety of

residential accretions during the period 1851-1914. Their morphological TABLE VII

Residential Development outside the Old Town, 1897-1914

Ref. to Area Housing Date Number of Acreage Gross Fig. 21 (Plan-unit) agency houses density

93 Queen Street A.W.B.A. 1897 31) 1.24) 25.0 Pt. 55 Lisburn Ter. S. 1907 5 L 83 0.20 L 3.93 25.0

34 King St. (Fig. 15c) A.U.D.C. 1897-1902 36 r43.2% 1.88 10.4% 19.2 90 Seaview Ter. N.E.R. 1898 11J 0.61J 18.0

Pt. 95 Bridge St. (Fig. 15b) 1898-1907 5 0.33" 15.1 44 Stott Street 1904-1909 29 2.11 13.7

Pt. 95 Swansfield Pk. Rd. 83 9.24 941I N.E. 1899-1903 15 43.2% 1.13 24.4% 13.3 88 Augur Flats D.o.N'd. 1912 10 1.11 9.0

Pt. 81 Swansfield Pk. Rd. (Fig. 15d) 1897-1911 23 4.36 5.3

Pt. 37 Prudhoe St. W. 1907 1 0.20 5.0

Pt. 43 Prudhoe St. E. 1898-1911 9' 2.37' 3.8 25 W. Green Batt

Extramural 1903 2 0.56 3.6 115 Sawmill Cott. D.o.N'd. 1902 2 0.94 2.1

Pt. 104 C. Alnmouth Rd. 26 24.65 (Fig. 15e) 1897-1901 4 13.6% 3.47 >65.2% 1.2

Pt. 104 The Close 1897-1908 2 1.73 1.2 99 Ravenslaw 1897-1914 3 3.63 0.8

Pt. 105 Alnmouth Rd. E. 1897-1906 3 5.47 0.6 72 Hillcrest 1903 1 6.48 0.2

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1897-1914 192 100% 37.82 100% 5.1

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1851-1914 349 63.99 5.5

expression in Alnwick's street-plan remains to be examined. As in the case of the Georgian period, there are three groups of plan-units: layouts, ribbons, and dispersed houses.

Among these, the layouts accommodated the majority of new houses and in that sense gained in relative significance (Fig. 15 in conjunction with Tables V-VII). Firstly, the existing layouts of the Howick Street area and the Hotspur Place area continued to grow during the Mid-Victorian period. The parts developed immediately before and, more so, after the passing of the Public

G

86 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

Health Act of 1875 can be recognized by the characteristic block-plans of tunnel-back houses or flats, forming terraces with serrated backs due to the appearance of scullery wings. They are accommodated in a pattern of small standardized plots with tiny front-gardens as at 'a' in Figure 15 f and in Hotspur Place in Figure 16. Gross densities for these particular terraces are 21.0 and 37.9 respectively, their building coverages 75.1 and 63.8. At the same time similar accretions occupied the remainder of Prudhoe Street West to the south of St. Paul's Church (37 in Fig. 21).

The major part of this type of growth, however, occurred on Wagonway Road immediately south of the railway station where a roughly triangular site, the residual of Cross Flats (Fig. 9), was developed by the Duke from 1884 on for workmen's cottages as a complete layout of 'bye-law' streets and tunnel- back terraces with front-gardens, backyards and service alleys. It was centred on Duke Street and Bridge Street (Fig. 15b and 95 in Fig. 21). Gross densities here averaged 20.8 but ranged from 14.8 to 24.9, the building coverages averag- ing 62.1 and ranging from 56.5 to 71.6. In other words, quantitative character- istics of the Late Victorian layout with small houses remain comparable to those of the Early Victorian period (cf. Table III and p. 73) though density maxima have decreased. A few years later the Queen Street area, a little to the south, was also developed as one unit by the Alnwick Workmen's Building Association with terraces of somewhat simpler outline, with straight backs and no front- gardens, at a gross density of 25.0 (93 in Fig. 21). Its frame was the Furlongs Close. The gross density in this type is approximately 25.0; building coverage averages 67.0 but ranges from 48.1 to 80.0 because of the smallness of plots where the addition of tiny front-gardens or of outbuildings causes appreciable differences. Almost simultaneously a third layout for workmen's houses was built on the south-west side of the town by the Local Authority as a housing scheme under the new Housing Act of 1890 and formed the King Street area. This is also a layout of bye-law type, with tunnel-back flats without front-

gardens at a gross density of 19.2 and a building coverage of 81 (Fig. 15c and 34 in Fig. 21). It occupied the crofts of the yards immediately to the north which fronted Clayport Street and became subject to slum clearance later. Soon after- wards the Stott Street area on the north-west side of the workhouse was built

up with tunnel-back houses of a better kind on slightly larger plots, with front-

gardens and bay windows, at a gross density of 13.7 and a building coverage of 42.6 (44 in Fig. 21). A little before that, Seaview Terrace, a bye-law terrace built for railwaymen at a density of 18 and a building coverage of 28.8, had appeared among the fields south of the Queen Street area near Wagonway Road. With its detached front-gardens and without a properly made-up road it is reminiscent of the arrangement in some mining villages of Northumberland but can hardly be regarded as a plan-unit in the full sense (90 in Fig. 21). Finally, in 1912 the Duke built the cottages at Augur Flats, to the east of the Queen Street area, in an unusually free and generous layout of relatively low density (9.0) and very low building coverage (9.7). It had terraced single-storey cottages for old people

MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK 87

facing a private open space and was clearly influenced in design by contem- porary planning ideas (88 in Fig. 21). Its name was derived from Agger Flats, an earlier field-name of the site.

The Victorian layouts formed independent units, inserted into the frame of existing roads and field boundaries but not forming integral parts of any unified scheme or road pattern that could have ensured a harmonious growth of the street-plan. This fragmentation of the growing built-up area, typical of all Victorian accretions," generally caused the abrupt termination of relatively short streets by cross-streets. It introduced a characteristic angularity of plan, emphasized by the monotonous cellular structure of standard plots with standard houses of the bye-law type arranged in terraces. The mechanical impression is increased by the strong parallelism imparted by standard street-widths and the back-alleys required by the bye-laws to provide secondary access to individual plots. The Victorian period in fact became the great era of occupation roads, a development already foreshadowed in the Howick Street layout (Fig. 15f). The bye-law layout was perfectly suited to the conditions of speculative development for maximum returns and of fragmented landownership such as obtained on the south and south-east side of Alnwick. Since its straight streets had to be fitted into the existing pattern of land parcels, they tended to take little account of relief, some streets running more or less straight uphill.

The need to open up new building land, however, promoted the deliberate siting of two co-ordinating roads on the south side of the town irrespective of any multiplicity of ownerships. The process had begun prior to 1851, when the western stretch of Prudhoe Street south of St. Paul's Church was laid out in continuation of Lisburn Street, the two roads being conceived as part of a future connection between Upper Clayport Street and South Road. Completion eastward was long retarded, partly by the existence of the glebe land of Croft House and partly by the fragmented ownership of the ancient Bondgate Crofts around it. The final plan for the siting of Prudhoe Street in this area was approved only in 1898, after which date the land was gradually colonized by residential buildings, the process having been completed only quite recently (Fig. 1, Fig. 3, Fig. 9, 43 in Fig. 21).

Farther south, beyond the Intermediate Fringe Belt, a roughly parallel connection between the ancient frame features of the Dunterns and Wagonway Road was needed as soon as this land was wanted for building purposes. Accordingly, Swansfield Park Road was proposed in 1892, the southern edge of the previously developed Bridge Street/Duke Street layout already conforming with the new line. By 1897 the new road had come into existence and parcella- tion of its frontages for building purposes was then proceeding in its eastern stretch (Fig. 1, Fig. 3).

Road Ribbons and Dispersed Development The Mid- and Late Victorian development of larger residences mainly took

the form of one irregular double ribbon along Alnmouth Road. The eastern

88 MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ALNWICK

area of open country beyond Denwick Lane and the railway was already be- coming a desirable residential area in Late Georgian and Early Victorian days. At that time Belvedere Terrace, Alnbank and Freelands (98 and 101 in Fig. 21) were sited on the flat gravel ridge overlooking a pleasant countryside to the north and south in a characteristic fringe-belt context (Fig. 3). This trend continued throughout the Victorian era (Fig. 1). Alnmouth Road acted here as virtually the only formative frame feature, since the fences of the new plots rarely conformed to existing field boundaries. The plots were fairly large, sometimes strip-shaped, sometimes squat. All accommodated the large detached and semi-detached houses typical of the Victorian and Edwardian period. The average depth of plots was 250-270 feet, the average gross density in the strip-plots 5.93, and their average building coverage 6.9 (Fig. 15e). On the north side, however, the more dispersed siting of large houses with very deep plots, introduced in the previous period by Alnbank and Freelands, was continued to the east of the latter. Here Ravensmede and West Acres were built in the 1870s with gross densities of 0.3 and 0.2 and building coverages of 2.9 and 2.2 respectively (Fig. 19e). To the north Allerburn House (1862) and Hillcrest (1903) represented comparable properties (74 and 72 in Fig. 21).

Between South Road and the railway, residential development in a ribbon of open formation and somewhat smaller plots, inaugurated earlier by Belvedere Terrace and with plot densities ranging from 0.8 to 5.1, filled the whole block by the end of the Edwardian period (97 and 99 in Fig. 21).

The only other instance of a Victorian road ribbon occurred in the south along the newly constructed Swansfield Park Road from 1897 onwards. In twelve years practically the whole of its north side was colonized by a single ribbon of standardized strip plots averaging 5.3 in gross density and 15.7 in building coverage. Its pattern bore no relation to existing field boundaries (Fig. 15d; 81 in Fig. 21). This residential ribbon accommodated mostly semi- detached and detached houses of medium size.

REFERENCES 1 W. W. TOMLINSON, op. cit., 690. 2 Cf. the cartographic evidence on the Ordnance Survey 1/528, ed. 1865, sheets 1-8; Ordnance

Survey 1/2500, ed. 1897, sheets XXXII. 9, XXXII. 13; ed. 1923, sheets XXXV. 1, XXXV. 2, XXXV. 6. 3 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 452. 4 Ibid., vol. ii, 224. ' This and other information given in this chapter has been obtained from early building plans

kept at the Surveyor's Office, Alnwick U.D.C., and made accessible to the writer by the kindness of Mr. G. Beaty.

6 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 471. 7 Ibid., vol. ii, 361. 8 TATE, op. cit., vol. i, 367. Cf. the contemporary lithographed plans of Alnwick Castle in the

Muniment Room of the castle. 9 Cf. HosKINS, op. cit., 222.

CHAPTER 8

MODERN ALNWICK

Economic Function and Social Requirements SINCE the Edwardian period Alnwick's function as a market town for the surrounding farming region has changed little. No important industry has been added, but the character as a service centre of true town status for a wider rural area has been emphasized by the presence of all the modern services and activities that may be expected in such a place. With the rise of the general standard of living and of social welfare, and with the increasing complexity of local and central government functions, these services have become more varied than they were in Victorian days.'

There are today in Alnwick five banks and a branch of Woolworth's besides the livestock market and other shops and professional services. Among a variety of community services Alnwick offers grammar schools, a hospital, a maternity home, two cinemas and a weekly newspaper. It is a sub-regional bus centre. It has a head post office and telephone exchange and is the seat of district offices for a range of central government departments, including an employment ex- change and an inland revenue office. It also has local area offices of several branches of the County Council administration as well as the offices of a Rural District Council, and Alnwick itself is an Urban District. Some of these services, as well as others catering for the daily social needs of the urban community, have required new or additional building accommodation and land. This applies especially to the local schools. Others, however, are in need of better accom- modation.

Alnwick's industries work generally with a small labour force. Some, like printing, a laundry, a creamery, a sawmill and a number of commercial garages and builders' yards, are service industries. Others, like brewing and engineering, have remained in Alnwick from earlier periods. The only industry not con- nected with the service centre and market town as such is the manufacture of fishing tackle carried on by two firms. In accordance with this economic back- ground, the population of Alnwick has increased only slightly during the modern period. After the First World War in fact it decreased in conformity with the general drift from country and country town to the larger urban centres, and has shown a moderate increase only recently. At the last census, in 1951, it was recorded as 7365 within the Urban District.

Modern changes in public transport have had an important influence on Alnwick as a service centre. The railway has been largely eclipsed by road passenger transport, the more so as the town does not lie on a main line and the Alnwick-Coldstream line, which formerly connected it with its western and north-western hinterland, has been closed and dismantled recently. Conversely,

89

90 MODERN ALNWICK

local and regional bus services have increased considerably. Since Alnwick lies on the Great North Road, the frequent long-distance services from Newcastle to Edinburgh pass through it. It is also the starting-point for eight local bus services, and is, therefore, a major bus centre in North Northumberland.

The Rate and General Mode of Recent Growth

Although the total population has changed little since the First World War, changes in the town plan have been considerable. Among all the aspects of a general rise in living standards that of housing has had the most direct and

TABLE VIII

Growth of the Built-up Area, 1827-1956 (in acres)

Old Town* in 1827 1827-51 1851-97 1897-1914 1918-39 Post-1945

Residential - 20.18 26.17 37.82 56.55+: 51.76+

Institutional 4.82 2.87 15.39 0.70 12.24

Commercial and Industrial - 3.63 10.96 0.56 2.20 0.27

TOTAL ADDITION - 28.63 40.00 53.77 59.45 64.27

TOTAL BUILT-UP AREA 99.86 128.49 162.83 t 216.60 272.13+ 333.571

* As shown on Wood's Map (1827), i.e. including the then built-up areas of Walkergate and Canongate. Lack of evidence renders subdivision by land-use categories impossible.

t The apparent deficiency of 5.66 acres in this total is due to the clearance of part of Canongate and Walkergate, only part of the affected area being redeveloped by the Duke of Northumberland before 1897.

+ Though all new houses and their plots are taken into account in the figures of residential

growth for the last two periods, some of them actually formed the two residential estates colonizing the parent plots previously occupied only by large Victorian residences, i.e. West Acres (1936) and Ravensmede (1948) and thus did not strictly increase the built-up area. Hence the apparent deficien- cies of 3.92 and 2.83 acres in the totals of the respective periods.

profound influence on town plans and is of greatest importance to the urban

geographer. This class of land use, more than any other, has contributed to the spectacular extension of built-up areas since the First World War. A compari- son of the residential areas developed in Alnwick since 1918 with those of pre- vious periods and with other land-use categories outside the Old Town indicates the relative significance of the phenomenon (Table VIII).

Of the formative factors underlying this process of residential expansion two are directly interrelated: the raised standards of housing required by public health and housing legislation and the ideals of the garden-city movement. Both required much more space about each individual dwelling than had been common earlier. Thus gross densities of twenty houses to the acre for the Duke

MODERN ALNWICK 91

Street area and the King Street area (Fig. 15b and c) contrast with the maximum gross density of twelve houses to the acre generally permitted since 1918 (Fig. 19). In other words, the family unit now occupied nearly twice the gross area formerly available. The contrast is much greater when the considerably larger average size of the Victorian family is taken into account as well as the much more cramped conditions of those back-to-back houses which have been discussed earlier as an important feature of repletive burgage development. A third formative factor of importance is modern road transport which helped to make this urban sprawl over hitherto open land appear natural and acceptable.

At the same time, the new housing standards as determined by law, the chronic shortage of modern houses for the lower income groups, and the resulting Housing Acts brought local authorities into the field. They hastened the long process of slum clearance which had begun somewhat feebly at the end of the Victorian period, and much of the centrally housed working-class population was transferred to the outskirts of towns. In this way the housing authority became the major agent in the modern expansion of the built-up area. Each of its new additions formed a unit with a rather larger number of houses than has been commonly the case with the local builder, though private develop- ment has also been of importance in Alnwick. As the major element in Aln- wick's modern accretions, this residential development will be discussed in greater detail later.

Cleared slum areas, presenting temporary waste land in the centre of Alnwick, appeared as the morphological correlative of peripheral municipal housing estates. They now cover approximately four acres, and are still expand- ing. They are intended to be used mainly for non-residential purposes and their entry into a 'redevelopment cycle' is, therefore, only a matter of time. Another

1L acres, however, have already been redeveloped, mainly with dwellings. Compared with housing, the increase in land used for non-residential

purposes in Alnwick has been slight. The rate of increase of commercially and industrially occupied land has actually declined since 1940, and the relatively higher figure for institutional land is accounted for by school building.

The modern changes in Alnwick's town plan have been of three different kinds. In the Old Town there has been simultaneously burgage repletion, slum clearance and some replacement. Outside fringe-belt development has con- tinued. But much the more impressive part of accretionary growth has taken the form of a variety of development units, extending the built-up area, not only to the south and east of the town as in former periods but also to the west. The accretions are no longer as compact as they were in early Victorian times, the outer built-up areas now being interspersed with unbuilt land as a result of associated fringe-belt development. It imparts to the growing town plan a looseness and irregularity of structure and outline which poses special problems of morphological analysis and subdivision. As a result of this recent spread the houses on the outskirts now lie at an average of three-quarters to one mile from the Market Place.

92 MODERN ALNWICK

Modern Changes in the Old Town2

Since 1918, the most important change in the centre of Alnwick has been slum clearance, followed in some cases by redevelopment. To understand the significance of this new process, it is necessary to return to Teasdale's Yard as a typical example of an ancient burgage which, after repletion during the Victorian period, became subject to slum clearance. Its earlier development has already been discussed. The plans of 1864 and 1921 indicate a very slight increase in building development since 1849 without altering its character (Fig. 14). But after 1921 the burgage experienced a sudden and radical change. In 1937 Teasdale's Yard together with most of the properties between it and Clayport Street, including the adjoining Angel Yard and Union Court, became subject to slum clearance (cf. Figs. 17 and 18). The back-to-back houses and virtually all the workshops and outhouses of the yard, some of them already derelict, were demolished, and the amount of land covered by buildings dropped almost to the level of 1774 (Plan of 1956 in Fig. 14). Moreover, most of the burgage boun- daries, formerly defined by walls or fences, disappeared, the whole clearance area being treated as one unit.

The history of Teasdale's Yard recorded in Figure 14 thus shows four distinct phases best demonstrated in terms of building coverage:

TABLE IX

Building Coverage in Teasdale's Yard, 1774-1956

1774 1827 1849 1864 1921 1956

14.7 34.8 62.9 65.2 65.2 19.3

The initial stage showing the area of the burgage as virgin land is lost in the Anglian period. An intermediate stage is recorded for 1774, but is doubtless broadly characteristic of most of the Middle Ages. It may be taken as illustrat- ing the first or institutive phase during which the burgage and its traditional structure became established as a plot with its own identity. Then follows a repletive phase of more or less continuous increase during the major part of the Industrial Revolution when building coverage is increased from one-seventh to almost two-thirds of the total burgage area. It is succeeded by a climax phase, with relative saturation and coincident with the consolidation period of the Industrial Revolution. Finally, there is a more or less abrupt recessive phase caused by a general revaluation of existing building types and building uses. This is due partly to economic changes resulting in the decline of certain of the older trades and small-scale manufactures, and partly to social changes such as those connected with the rise of living standards. These are reflected in the requirements of modern housing legislation as well as in the increase of all kinds of community services. The effect of these social factors is to devalue the

MODERN ALNWICK 93

ALNWICK- OLD TOWN AND INNER FRINGE BELT IN 1956

0 O O 0 0 0 SCALE OF FEET

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CLEARED SITES (URBAN FALLOW)

- ** FIXATION LINE OF INNER FRINGE SELT PERIPHERAL OPEN SPACES CREATED BEFORE 192l

""0- INTRA--AND

EXTRAMURAL LIMITS OF INNER FRINGE ,L

A ANGEL YARD C MOORE YARD E ROXBURGH PLACE C TEASALE ARD

FORMER YARS - CORRECTION HOUSE YARD POTTERATE PLACE F STAMP YARD H UNION COURT

BULDNS RCTD EWEN 191 N 15 COMMERCIAL ND INDU5TRAL BUILDING AND THEIRACCESSORIE (b) OMMNIT AN INTITUION L BILDNGSAND HEI ACESSRIE (c)DWELIGHOSESWIH O WIHO T SOPSAN THIR CCSSOIE L _, BUIDINS, OHERTHANON CEARD SIESDEMOISHE BEWEEN 192 AND195 = CLEARED SITE (URBAN FALLOW FIXA ION INE F IN ER FINGE BEL

FORMR YRDS 6 CORECIONHOUS YAD D POTERGAE PACE - F TAM'S ARD UNON OUR

FIGURE 18

94 MODERN ALNWICK

existing building fabric as well as to render obsolete the excessive land-use parcellation in the old burgage yards. It promotes the clearance of these areas in larger units, with consequent radical changes in the townscape. In the final stage of this process the building coverage falls approximately to that of the initial stage or may even be nil if the plot dominants at the street front have also become subject to obsolescence and the general devaluation. Burgages thus affected become partly or wholly waste land, but only temporarily so. Sooner or later socio-economic revaluation of the site within its urban setting attracts new forms of land use, such as those resulting in central redevelopment schemes or in public open spaces. In a different context of rural land use in western Germany W. Hartke has likened such temporarily waste land to the fallow in agricultural rotation. He calls it social fallow (Sozialbrache) because the tem- porary cessation of its use is the result of socio-economic changes involving an eventual revaluation of the land in terms of land use.3 In this general sense Hartke's concept can be applied to slum clearance, and the waste land affected may then be called urban fallow.

We see now that the development demonstrated in the case of Teasdale's Yard is clearly cyclic. Produced by factors operative over the country as a whole and, therefore, affecting ancient burgages widely, it represents a general phenomenon in English urban morphology and may be recognized as the burgage cycle. Its final stage is marked by the state of urban fallow accompanied by the complete or partial obliteration of the original burgage units and their buildings. This effacement of traditional plan features represents a major morphological change and terminates the burgage cycle. At the same time the urban fallow forms the initial stage of a succeeding redevelopment cycle, being a necessary prerequisite for effective investment of new capital in the site. The lamellate pattern of strip burgages, already modified by amalgamation, is generally too fine-grained to allow redevelopment in accordance with modern building and planning standards. At the same time the central position of these areas allows them to retain their economic or social potential. Under modern conditions the discrepancy is resolved by the pooling of plots followed by wholesale clearance, usually by compulsory purchase on the part of the local authority. All this commonly affects the burgage tails and their repletive building fabric. But it may also include the plot dominants on the burgage heads if these are too outmoded or if the social revaluation of the area entails an important functional change.

Figure 18 shows the Old Town already widely affected by the processes just discussed. Altogether nine sites have become subject to slum clearance and nearly all are at present in different stages of development.

Two of the more prominent sites are situated in the Market Street/Green Batt Area. They have been cleared since 1953 and are already of appreciable size, yet their irregular boundaries suggest a state of immaturity. They represent the first two instalments of the complete clearance of internal back land in this street-block, in preparation for a proposed central redevelopment scheme.

MODERN ALNWICK 95

On four other smaller sites, clearance is more or less complete. Among these Pottergate Place presents greater difficulties to redevelopment because of its general shape, the high retaining wall at the back in substitution of the original western slope of the Bow Burn valley, and thus its limited accessibility in conjunction with its very marked back-land position (cf. Fig. 4)4.

Finally, there are three sites showing different types and stages of re- development. The largest, some two acres in extent, lies on the north side of Clayport Street. With its generally smaller burgages (cf. Fig. 5) and its remoter position, it became one of the most crowded parts of the town during the nineteenth century (Union Court). No less than twenty-seven fatal cases of cholera were recorded here in 1849, and it had been scheduled for improvement already in Late Victorian days. Its burgage cycle has been illustrated by the example of Teasdale's Yard. Today the western part of the whole site has been partially redeveloped for commercial purposes, but most remains waste land available to accommodate a future bus station. On the second clearance site south of Clayport Street redevelopment occurred in a 'split' cycle. The back, facing the King Street area, reached maturity in a single phase when Monk- house Terrace was built in 1924, while the Clayport front has reached only an intermediate stage with the erection of a temporary fire-station. The interior of the site is still waste. While these two areas do not present new streets and are, therefore, examples of purely adaptive redevelopment, the third area, about li acres between Pottergate and the Drill Hall, is different. It was cleared in 1938, including the notorious Moore's Yard on its west side. Soon after the Second World War it was redeveloped for housing by the Duke and the town council, who erected the Memorial Cottages and the Bowburn Cottages for old people, the whole forming a layout with a new internal road and open spaces. This is, therefore, the only cleared site in Alnwick associated with the addition of a new street, thus providing an example of augmentative redevelopment distinct from the adaptive forms mentioned earlier. Among the sites subject to slum clearance since 1918, it is also the only one which has completed the institutive phase of its redevelopment cycle. It presents, therefore, a parallel to the rather earlier cases of Georgian and Edwardian redevelopment in Canongate.

Slum clearance has thus affected different parts of the Old Town in different ways. It may usefully be considered together with the morphological processes of repletion as well as replacement in the Old Town. Keeping in mind the processes in retrospect (Figs. 10, 11, 12, 16 and 17), the diversity of their geo- graphical result in terms of the existing town plan will become clear (Fig. 18).

Characteristically, clearance first affected those burgages of the ancient borough that had a peripheral situation away from the market area. This applies notably to the Stonewell street-block near the Bow Burn and Clayport Tower where the ancient plots had contained small houses and cramped pre- mises for some time. On the other hand, the burgage series occupied by Fenkle Street West Row has escaped similar changes except at its northern and southern extremities. Indeed, its centre has continued with repletive development and

96 MODERN ALNWICK

replacement on a scale not found elsewhere within the Old Town except on the north side of Bondgate Without. Judging by the evidence of 1774, the centre of Fenkle Street West Row began early with marked replacement of dominants on large plots resulting from burgage amalgamation. Situated on the higher side of the Central Triangle, away from the two thoroughfares and yet centrally placed, it may have been the more 'exclusive' side at that time and later. Spaciousness characterized both plots and plot dominants, which housed coaching inns and hotels, a bank and the post office. In spite of vigorous tail-end repletion of a very different kind in the Stonewell area, the parent plots kept their generally unencumbered state until increasing pressure of claims on these central sites caused a 'rebound'. The new post office and telephone exchange, replacing several plot dominants, express this functionally conditioned change in the plan.

Elsewhere the traditional plot dominants of central Alnwick, mostly Late Georgian in character, remain intact except for an occasional new facade or new shop. This means that the ancient road fork and Central Triangle with its associated plot dominants today preserve the traditional street spaces of Alnwick. The whole in fact represents the most important urban residue, besides the castle and St. Michael's Parish Church. Its judicious preservation in the context of all other claims constitutes an important planning problem of the town.

On the other hand, the congested townscape behind the front rows of plot dominants, though of great interest to the historical geographer, cannot claim the same intrinsic value as a physical environment for present-day living and working and is bound to disappear in time. The Market Street/Green Batt area with its steadily extending cleared sites provides an interesting but com- plicated case. At present most of the burgages between St. Michael's Lane and the Corn Exchange are waste in their interior between the frontal plot domi- nants on Market Street and the tail-end plots with their own dominants on Green Batt. Elsewhere, back buildings in a partial or complete stage of dilapidation are irregularly distributed among buildings in full use, often medial plot dominants. Indeed, on some burgages at the west and east ends there has been repletive development since the First World War. The Market Street/Green Batt area, then, represents a street-block offering differential resistance to the completion of its burgage cycle because of the great diversity in its plot pattern and associated buildings. This in turn reflects the long history of repletion in this block, itself a direct consequence of its position in the earlier town plan.

The contrast with Bondgate (Within) North Side is striking. Here reple- tion, already comparatively slight during the Victorian period, has been virtu- ally absent since 1918 and so has slum clearance, leaving many of the burgages intact or in the earlier stages of their repletive phase.

No morphological change has taken place in the Market area since 1918, other than an occasional change in the use of shops and business premises. In the Bailiffgate area modern changes are moderate and entirely repletive in

MODERN ALNWICK 97

character amounting to the conversion of a back-yard into a covered commer- cial garage and the addition of accessories to the Duchess's School and the Roman Catholic Convent.

The two oldest ribbons of the town show more considerable additions (Fig. 8). In the Clayport ribbon the development of the old burgages on the south side and their site successors has already been described. The shadow of obsolescence has fallen on that of the opposite side where slum clearance has already affected Stamp's Yard (cf. Fig. 18). The Bondgate ribbon shows important changes, the cinema and an adjoining house representing replace- ments and the commercial garage repletive development.

Residential Plan- Units

As seen earlier, peripheral accretions since 1918, like those of the Later Victorian period, were mainly residential but much more extensive. The new residential area amounted to about 108 acres and contained 1169 houses, as compared with 349 houses on 64 acres added during the period 1851-1914.

Table II (p. 53) shows that during the three major periods of growth after 1750 the number of houses has increased roughly in the ratio 1 : 2: 7. If one allows for the unequal lengths of the three periods, however, the relative rate of increase has been accelerated in the ratio 1 : 4 : 23. This acceleration is paralleled by that within the modern period, the relative rate of incresse be- tween 1918-39 and 1945-56 following roughly the ratio 1 : 1. The increase in acreage is somewhat different, the respective ratios being roughly 1 : 2 : 3, 1 :3 :9 and 1 : 2. In other words, relative increase in acreage has been much slower owing to the decreasing share of large residences in modern development. Conversely Table II shows an increase in average gross densities though within the modern period there has been a lowering due to improved design of housing layouts. In this general picture the accretionary residential development of the modern period appears as one serving the broad mass of the population much more than that of former periods and being subject to steadily improving general housing standards. The incidence of residential gross densities by individual street plan-units points in the same direction (Table IV, p. 55). High densities have virtually disappeared and low densities are concentrated in Class IV, i.e. between the values 2 and 4. In other words the great spread in densities so characteristic of the Georgian and Victorian periods has been eliminated. Medium densities now dominate and there is a characteristic recent shift of emphasis from the higher to the lower medium densities.

During the inter-war period (Table X) nearly half the number of new houses on the outskirts of the town occurred in plan-units of the higher medium densities on about two-fifths of the new residential acreage. This represents the standard type of development for the period, with compact layouts and ribbons, two-thirds of it being council housing. Another quarter of the new houses on less than one-third of the additional acreage falls within the central class (VI)

98 MODERN ALNWICK

of the medium-density group. This is a slightly more spacious type of develop- ment, though more than half is represented by council housing of the standard type and obtains its low gross density only by the inclusion of internally placed allotment gardens. The low medium densities are represented by about 7 per cent of the new houses on one-seventh of the additional acreage. They are restricted to cases where the morphological frame presented special conditions enforcing a relatively lower density than would have occurred otherwise. The amount of low-density development is negligible. Unusual even for the inter-

TABLE X

Residential Development outside the Old Town, 1918-39

Ref. to Area Council Date Number of Acreage Gross Fig. 21 (Plan-unit) housing houses density

78 Oak St.-Beech St. (Fig. 19c) + 1937 116)17.7% 6.56}11.67o 17.6

77 St. Thomas's Crescent 1 1937 72" 4.88 14.7 87 Aydon Crescent 1936 18 1.24 14.5 89 York Cr.-York Rd. S. side + 1926-30 51 313 3.55

23.43 14.4

91 Augur Ter. W. 1926 26 47.8

1.83 41.2o

14.2 Pt. 83 Greensfield Ave. E. 1939 42 3.28 12.8

86 York Rd. N. side 1926 19 1.57 12.4 79 Clayport Gdns. + 1936 85 7.08 12.0

Pt. 85 Lindisfarne Rd. (Fig. 19f) 1925 34 3.18 10.7 Pt. 85 St. George's Cr. (Fig. 19f) + 1922-24 94 174 9.20 44 10.2

Pt. 81 The Dunterns 1938-39 31 26.6% 3.30 31.0% 9.4

Pt. 81 Swansfield Pk. Rd. S.W. side 1922-36 15 1.76f 8.5 ______________ __________________________________________________ _______________________I

_...... .___________

Pt. 60 Police Houses N. * 1938 7 48 1.041 7.79 6.7 103 West Acres (Fig. 19e) 1936 41f 7.3% 6.75J 13.8% 6.1

133 Shepherd's Rest 1924 4

4

0.6% 1.33) 2.4% 3.0

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1918-40 655 100% 56.55 100% 11.6 * Housing provided by Northumberland County Council.

war period is the occurrence of high-density development which, as council housing, supplied no less than about one-sixth of the new houses on one-ninth of the additional acreage. Altogether, council housing accounted for 418 houses or 64 per cent of the new residential development.

In the post-war period (Table XI) the medium densities hold the field more exclusively owing to the disappearance of high density development. Within them the higher density class accounts for a fifth of the new houses on 15 per cent of the additional area, but the bulk (71 per cent) lies in the medium class of

MODERN ALNWICK 99

8-12 houses per acre covering more than two-thirds of the additional acreage. Between them these two classes contain all the council housing outside the Old Town, amounting to 448 or 87 per cent of the new houses. In comparison the residential development at lower medium densities, mostly private, is small, and

TABLE XI

Residential Development outside the Old Town, 1945-56

Ref. to Area Council Date Number of Acreage Gross

Fig. 21 (Plan-unit) housing houses density

84 New Wagonway Rd. 106 7.78 Estate (Fig. 19g) + 1956 64 20.6% 4.54 15.1% 14.1

Pt. 83 Greensfield Ave. W. - 1953 42J 3.24J 12.9

76 Barresdale + 1947 150' 13.06- 11.4 Pt. 82 Blakelaw Rd. W.

(Fig. 19d) 1950-53 22 2.05 10.7 45 Windsor Gardens

(Fig. 19b) + 1953 68 366 6.35 34.9 10.7

92 Augur Ter. E. (Fig. 19h) + 1946 50 71.2%

.70 67.5Y

10.6 65 Houses S. of Council

House + 1953 4 0.40 10.0 102 Ravensmede (Fig. 19e) + 1948 28 2.86 9.8 46 Alwynside (Fig. 19a) + 1952 42 5.27 8.0

Pt. 60 Police Houses S. * 1953 2 0.25 8.0

Pt. 85 Victoria Crescent 1956 2' 0.27' 7.4 118 Firemen's Houses * 1952 11 1.81 6.1

Pt. 82 Blakelaw Rd. E. 34 6.12 (Fig. 19d) 1953-55 14 6.6 2.54

,1.8% 5.5

Pt. 80 Dunterns North 1950-55 2 0.39 5.1 43 Prudhoe St. E. 1952-54 4 0.87 4.6

Pt. 80 Dunterns South 1955 1 0.24 4.2

Pt. 55 Lisburn Ter. S. 1953 1 0.28- 3.6 39 Bungalows nr.

Duke's School 1952 2 8 0.62 2.92

3.2 Pt. 100 Alnmouth Rd. W. 1952 1

.6 0.31

5.6 3.2

Pt. 100 Alnmouth Rd. W. 1952 2 0.65 3.1 105 Alnmouth Rd. E. 1955 1 0.41 2.4

Pt. 104 C. Alnmouth Rd. 1954 1 0.65 ) 1.5

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1946-56 514 100% 51.76 100% 9.9

TOTAL DEVELOPMENT 1918-56 1169 108.31 10.8

* Housing provided by Northumberland County Council.

low-density development is negligible as regards the number of houses involved. A prominent feature of modern residential development, then, is the in-

creasing share taken by the local authority as a housing agency, indicating a trend initiated by the Housing Act of 1890 and intensified continuously since then. Table XII shows this for the period from 1897 to 1956.

100 MODERN ALNWICK

Allowing for the different lengths of the three periods involved the relative rate of the provision of council houses has been accelerated roughly in the ratio 1 :9 :21 and that of the requisite land in the ratio 1 : 13 :37. The divergence in these ratios indicates the marked decrease in gross densities. These figures speak eloquently of the great influence which local authorities have on the urban morphology of the English market town.

On the whole, residential accretions since 1918 consist either of layouts in the form of municipal or private housing estates or of simple residential ribbons.

In a few cases houses occupy small previously undeveloped plots singly or in very small groups. This complementary building development is noticeable on

TABLE XII

Council Housing, 1897-1956

Period % of total Number of Acreage Gross housing houses density

1897-1914 18.7 36 4.0% 1.88 2.6% 19.2 1918-1939 63.6 418 46.3% 31.27 42.5% 13.4 1945-1956 86.9 448 49.7% 40.42 54.9% 11.1

TOTAL 66.1 902 100% 73.57 100% 12.3

the more recent eastern stretch of Prudhoe Street where the road, running transversely across the 'grain' of the ancient Bondgate Crofts and so cutting them up into smaller units, has combined with the traditional multiplicity of ownerships in this area and the retardation caused by the former extent of glebe land to create conditions peculiarly favourable for this type of growth (43 in Fig. 21; cf. Figs. 1 and 9).

The housing estate or residential layout is a plan-unit large enough to con- tain a system of new internal roads. In Alnwick these are generally designed exclusively as residential streets since distance from the town centre is rarely more than 3 mile and there is no need for a local shopping centre. The indivi- dual housing estate is not traversed by any pre-existing roads, though these commonly run along one side and gather the traffic from the adjoining housing areas. The housing estates are designed to feed their own traffic into these pre- existing roads which thus form functionally an important part of the morpho- logical frame for the new accretions. In Alnwick such roads are Howling Lane, Wagonway Road and its southern continuation, and Swansfield Park Road, while Alnmouth Road, though a major traffic road, serves the estates at West Acres in a similar way. The rest of the frame is largely supplied by pre-existing field boundaries, and as each field is unique, the layout of internal residential streets is correspondingly so. Thus residential layouts show morphological conformity comparable to that of the market concretions of the Central Triangle. Good examples are provided by Figure 19a, h, e, and b. Such estates, then,

MODERN ALNWICK 101

MODERN DEVELOPMENT UNITS IN ALNWICK

SCALE OF FEET Eoo

KEY TO MAP e'

PRE-VICTORIAN ROADS AND BOUNDARIES

...* MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN ROADS AND BOUNDARIES

b MODERN ROADS AND BOUNDARIES

Z:f r MID- AND LATE VICTORIAN DETACHED HOUSES

-HOUSES OF THE INTER-WAR PERIOD

• - POST-WAR HOUSES

d e

SEC. Mo 00

O

SCHOOL

f h

SALLOTMEmrrj e ztr

c I zo

FIGURE 19

H

102 MODERN ALNWICK

even when containing nothing but semi-detached houses, have individuality as plan-units.

We may examine their plan characteristics further in conjunction with the quantitative data of Tables X and XI. Among the pre-war layouts the plan-unit with the highest density (17.6) and a building coverage of 29.5 is the Oak Street/ Beech Street area (Fig. 19c). It represents an unorthodox and now no longer favoured essay in the rehousing of population from slum clearance areas. It is an attempt to provide a healthier environment, but one which should be as near as possible to the conditions to which the rehoused population had been accustomed. Hence the smallness of garden plots and the emphasis on terrace blocks with up to eight houses, but without access tunnels from the front and therefore with separate back-lanes providing rear access to walled back-yards, an unusual feature in housing estates after 1918. A more open variant is represented by the York Road area (89 in Fig. 21) which mixes terrace blocks with pairs of semi-detached houses. On the whole, however, semi-detached houses with gardens became the general rule for municipal housing in Alnwick until 1939 since they tended to be regarded as complying best with the new housing standards created by legislation after the First World War. The pre- 1939 character of these plan-units is easily recognized by the generally slightly higher densities (above 12) and the more mechanical arrangement of houses. This entails straight building lines, a general use of 'through' roads, and an absence of internal open spaces and culs-de-sac, all characteristics tending to create the more monotonous townscape of 'suburbia'. Thus, even with low building coverages, as in the case of St. George's Crescent (14.3), the grouping of houses near the street gives an appearance of crowding. Culs-de-sac occur generally in this generation of layouts only as accidental 'boundary culs-de-sac' as in the cases of Lindisfarne Road (Fig. 19f) and West Acres (Fig. 19e), without architectural treatment.

Since 1945, however, the plan features of housing estates in Alnwick have changed notably. Their gross densities are generally below twelve.' The earliest post-war estate is at Augur Terrace (East), characteristic in its restric- tion to completely detached standard dwellings. This points to its nature as emergency housing in the form of prefabricated detached bungalows at a density of 10.6 but with the rather high building coverage of 26.7 (Fig. 19h). The Barresdale area shows the return to semi-detached houses and 'through' roads, but already with broken building lines to create architectural interest in the townscape (76 in Fig. 21). The Ravensmede Estate goes a step further in architectural design. It introduces the true cul-de-sac, closed at the end by houses, and a more conscious grouping of buildings at the relatively low density of 9.8 and the fairly high building coverage of 20.8. The latter is con- ditioned partly by the generously dimensioned road with its open-space features (Fig. 19e). The last stage in this post-war development is represented by Wind- sor Gardens and Alwynside which combine the manipulation of house groups and broken building lines with the introduction of internal open spaces (Fig.

MODERN ALNWICK 103

19b and a). This results in frequently lower gross densities (8.0 at Alwynside) and in a variation of the cul-de-sac motif. It gives a general freedom and open- ness of arrangement emphasized by lower building coverages (Windsor Gardens 18.5, Alwynside 18.9) and represents modern ideas of residential design more adequately than the estates built before 1939. It is calculated to create a more human and intimate townscape, notably when coupled with the preservation of mature trees or the grouped planting of new ones. The latest layout in the modern style is situated on South Wagonway and introduces a combination of terrace blocks, semi-detached houses and terraced bungalows, the latter on the east side of South Wagonway (Fig. 19g). The shallow sites here result in relatively high values of gross density (14.1) and building coverage (23.7).

The local authority generally provides housing in the form of estates in order to erect dwellings in quantity and to keep the additional built-up areas compact. The private builder, especially between the two world wars, has tended to develop building land also in the form of single or double ribbons along existing roads. It seemed economically advantageous, especially in piece- meal development, to have a ready-made road available, and it often already contained the necessary utility services. Generally these very simple plan-units of the inter-war period are exclusively residential and in a small town like Alnwick tend to be filled with the same type of house. They can be distinguished as residential ribbons from the complex arterial ribbons such as Bondgate Without. Since they develop on the frontages of existing roads running out into the open country, they impair the traffic efficiency of these roads. They also detract from visual amenities of the countryside and their further development has been made virtually impossible under present planning administration. In Alnwick, however, residential ribbons occur generally on minor traffic and residential streets when backed or faced by large school plots as in several cases on the south side. It is a form largely conditioned by associated fringe-belt development. House types include semi-detached and detached houses as well as bungalows. Where gross densities are between 8 and 14 the plots are often so narrow that the addition of private garages may completely close a series of pairs of semi-detached houses. The west side of Blakelaw Road (Fig. 19d) with a gross density of 10.7 and the very high building coverage of 33.7 illustrates this and contrasts with the east side of the same road where site conditions have enforced low values in gross density (5.5) and building coverage (15.4).

From this discussion modern residential development emerges as generally very different in quantitative traits from that of the Late Victorian and Edward- ian period. Its lower densities, usually below fifteen, and its lower building coverages, rarely above twenty-five, contrast with those of the earlier period when small houses were packed much more closely, with building coverages generally above fifty.

Together, housing estates and residential ribbons form the more sub- stantial of Alnwick's peripheral accretions since 1918 (Figs. 1 and 20): an interrupted and in parts very loosely knit zone. To the north-west of Clayport

104 MODERN ALNWICK

Street, this zone consists almost entirely of six municipal housing estates representing the complete sequence of designs from the inter-war period to 1956 (45, 46, 76, 77, 78 and 79 in Fig. 21). Their morphological frame is provided by field boundaries dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and by Howling Lane which represents the minor traffic street here. Without excep- tion their street-systems are conditioned by this frame and provide excellent examples of morphological conformity.

On the south side of the town, the modern accretions form a somewhat larger and more diversified complex that falls into two parts. In the eastern the theme of compact units, characteristic of the Wagonway Road area already in Victorian days, has been maintained, albeit in terms of modern bye-law and planning requirements. Owing to the configuration of the pre-1914 built-up area the new housing estates in this locality sometimes show complementary position and for that reason tend to be small (Figs. 20 and 21). The earlier building development here, together with the railway line to Wooler, ancient field boundaries of generally small closes, and Wagonway Road, have formed a more stringent morphological frame. The commonest building and plot unit is the semi-detached house typical of the inter-war period.

The western part of the southern zone contrasts strongly with the rest because of its exclusive use of the residential ribbon in close association with large and open school plots. Growth in this area has been dominated by fringe- belt development since Late Victorian days. A notable detail is the recurrent intercalation of contiguous private garages between adjoining pairs of semi- detached houses (Fig. 19d). Farther north, in and near to the Intermediate Fringe Belt, modern development has been largely complementary, especially in and around the eastern part of Prudhoe Street. Here all the residual open plots of the ancient Bondgate Crofts are now built up or are open spaces with a typical urban land use (39, 43 and 60 in Fig. 21).

To the east, modern development has also taken the form of housing estates. Of the two estate layouts in this area, that of West Acres shows the normal features of private development during the inter-war period, while that of Ravensmede has been explained earlier as a post-war composition (Fig. 19e). The most remarkable feature of these two estates, however, is that they represent a peculiar form of modern repletive growth, having filled up the plots of the two Victorian dominants from which they take their names. The phenomenon is recurrent in British urban morphology. The two large Victorian houses, prov- ing too cumbersome and uneconomic as private residences, were abandoned as such, and their well-wooded land became available for housing development. The old dominants themselves, being structurally sound, survived on their restricted parent plots, as they could be converted into flats, a characteristic modification of building use. With their setting of mature trees they have influenced the new layouts of which they now form integral parts as typical residual dominants. Thus the two estates present a distinct type of modern accretionary growth, the repletive layout.

MODERN ALNWICK 105

Outer Fringe-Belt Development

Simultaneously with the growth of residential accretions the two outer fringe belts of Alnwick have developed further and extended their area since 1918 (Fig. 13). Under modern conditions, however, peripheral housing has grown more continuously and less compactly. In some places housing areas have transgressed and modified the fringe belts before the latter were con- solidated, e.g. the western housing estates in the case of the Intermediate Belt and Greensfield Avenue in the case of the Outer. Their growth has no longer taken place compactly behind a simple advancing front but has tended to leap- frog residual open land. This happened especially if such land had been en- cumbered by adjoining belt development and thus retained no effective frontage to a pre-existing radial road from the town or was subject to other impediments retarding its development. Hence the continued existence of agricultural residuals east and north-east of the infirmary, east of the Duke's School, and to the south and west of Bellevue. Thus there has been more continuous interplay between the outward advance of residential accretions and the growth of the Intermediate and Outer Fringe Belts. Nevertheless, typical fringe-belt elements like new allotments, new schools, and other institutions have continued to be located in relatively peripheral position on open farm land. The schools, more- over, naturally tend to follow the expansion of residential areas. As a result, the looseness of relation between the actual fringe of the built-up area and its corresponding fringe belt, already noticeable to a degree in early Victorian times, has become much more marked recently. One can observe continued 'belt' development on previously open land of the Intermediate and Outer Fringe Belts as well as an increasing zonal interpenetration between these two belts on the one hand and the residential accretions with which they are associated on the other. This imparts an irregularity of general layout and land-use pattern to the modem built-up area which is difficult to understand until one recognizes its evolutionary significance in terms of the fringe-belt concept.

The Intermediate Belt has grown differentially in its various parts. In the east, physical growth has been weak and the belt remains disjointed, but functional changes have been considerable. In its southern stretch the belt has reached an advanced stage of consolidation, though patches of farmland survive and some plots have been colonized by residential accretions. In the western stretch the belt is again more disjointed and still very incomplete. Here the history of large landownerships has conditioned the steady growth of housing estates since 1936 as well as the long survival of farmland and its ultimate reservation for institutional purposes. The Intermediate Belt, then, is seen to be approaching maturity. One of its most marked evolutionary characteristics is the large number of units alienated, chiefly by absorption on the part of ad- vancing residential accretions. Figure 13 shows these wherever the town has extended its built-up area at different periods. It helps to emphasize the fact

106 MODERN ALNWICK

that the loss of component plots or fringe-belt alienation occurs in two distinct ways: by belt translation and by accretionary absorption.

The Outer Fringe Belt, though really applying only to the southern margin of the town, is now nearly as extensive. Its consolidation is most advanced in and about the angle of the two railway lines, which are themselves typical fringe-belt features with their embankments and cuttings. Colonization within the angle shows a representative assortment of industries, public utilities, associated small houses, and open spaces. It gives an unmistakable fringe-belt appearance to Alnwick's 'gateway' from the south, easily observed by road or rail. Farther west follows a sector of mutual interpenetration with residential accretions. In the main this is an area of large school sites. Here the new Secondary Modern School is already the most striking feature of the developing townscape. Farther west again the Outer Fringe Belt loses some of its intrinsic character as it includes the contiguous areas of Swansfield Park and Alnwick Moor. The latter could be regarded with equal justification as ordinary country- side. Nevertheless, it is also a long-established open space that sets a definite limit to the town's growth on this side, and its peculiar swarm of Freemen's cottages forms a distinctive, if somewhat extenuated, fringe-belt feature. Swansfield House and its park are now a part of the Outer Belt by virtue of their topographical position. Having begun as one of the earliest distal units of the first - now Inner - Fringe Belt, this residence became subsequently part of the Intermediate Belt when that gained its own identity in the middle of the nineteenth century. It has, therefore, experienced fringe-belt translation twice.

On the basis of all these developments, the morphology of the three fringe belts of Alnwick can be finally contrasted. The Inner Belt was the earliest and originated from a fixation line which had marked the stationary town fringe for some time and developed into a consequent ring road. It was also the first belt to be completed and shows modern growth only in some replacements and a modest amount of repletive development. Along its fixation line it has been continuous from the start and today forms a fairly compact zone with a close- grained intramural and a coarser proximal extramural. Even in the latter, however, the plot size is generally smaller than in the other belts, except of course in the north, where the castle and the grounds of the Dukes of Northum- berland have presented very special conditions from an early time. From the beginning there was also a distal extramural, placed disjointedly in the surround- ing countryside. In this direction the belt gained enormous width, but inevitably at the expense of definition and identity. As the town has developed further, the whole of this distal part has been alienated, partly by fringe-belt translation through the emergence of younger belts, partly by accretionary absorption. What remains is a well-defined closed fringe belt. It contrasts with the Inter- mediate and Outer Belts, which originated much later and without reference to a fixation line. Far from beginning as continuous zones, they have been effectively prevented from becoming such by the simultaneous piecemeal expansion of residential accretions and they are today broken or open fringe

MODERN ALNWICK 107

belts. They have attained their present belt-like extent only recently, usually by the addition of very large plots that distinguish them from the Inner Belt. Some of these units have been inherited by fringe-belt translation, others have been newly formed, often under site conditions created in an earlier fringe-belt context. The development of these plots is the morphological expression of functional changes, i.e. the advent of new social and utility services and their location in regional service centres. Some of these new types of land-use units include considerable open spaces. They weaken the built-up character of the belts, which are after all a form of urban accretion, by lowering their average building coverage over considerable areas. They also impede passage across the belts, their very size causing an appreciable lowering of street density, i.e. the average street length per acre of area occupied by urban land uses. Open fringe belts, therefore, have the effect of loosening the plan structure of all urban accretions in conditions of mutual interpenetration.

REFERENCES 1 For the criteria determining the classification of service centres, cf. A. E. SMAILES, 'The urban

hierarchy of England and Wales', Geography, 29 (1944), 41-51. R. E. DICKINSON, City, region and regionalism (1947), 45-51; H. E. BRACEY, Social provision in rural Wiltshire (1952); H. E. BRACEY, 'Towns as rural service centres, etc.', Transactions and Papers, 1953, Institute of British Geographers, 19 (1953), 95-105; F. H. W. GREEN, 'Urban hinterlands in England and Wales', Geographical Journal, 116 (1950), 64-88.

2 For some of the data used in this and the following sub-sections the author is greatly indebted to Mr. G. Beaty.

3 W. HARTKE, 'Die soziale Differenzierung der Agrarlandschaft im Rhein-Main-Gebiet', Erd- kunde, 7 (1953), 13-22; W. HARTKE, 'Die Sozialbrache als Phainomen der geographischen Differen- zierung der Landschaft', Erdkunde, 10 (1956), 257-69.

4 Since this was written, there has been further slum clearance, especially in the Market Street /Green Batt area and in Upper Clayport Street (north side).

PART III

THE EXISTING TOWN PLAN OF ALNWICK

CHAPTER 9

TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS

IN the preceding analysis the physical growth of Alnwick has been followed in major stages from Anglian times to the present day. Thus the characteristics of individual components of the present town plan have become explicable in reference to their periods and modes of development. On this basis the plan as a whole can be examined in terms of morphogenetic types of plan-units as well as of resulting geographical structure.

Figure 20 shows the distribution of types of plan-units, and its key of symbols indicating thirteen major and forty-nine sub-types gives a general idea of the morphological complexity of this small market town.,

The Ancient Borough Plan

The first and oldest major plan type is represented by the ancient borough (i), with the three deep-burgage series round its former triangular market, its three arterials leading outward from the corners of the latter, and its medieval extension of Pottergate. As suggested earlier, the deep burgages put this plan- unit into the general class of medieval High Street layouts. The peculiar archaic street-system with its large Central Triangle appears to present a special type within this class which might be introduced provisionally as the Alnwick type.

Whereas this layout remains virtually unaltered in its street-system, its area of constituent burgage series has been influenced by the burgage cycle and the evolution of the Inner Fringe Belt. Consequently it has suffered the triple metamorphosis of replacements at the burgage heads, repletion in the burgage tails, and reduction in area by tail truncation and slum clearance. Each of the three main series has been affected differently by these changes and so con- stitutes a separate sub-type of plan, the average state of its burgages providing the general criterion for classification. On the north-east side of the Central Triangle there is the Bondgate sub-type (1), a deep-burgage series already truncated but in a relatively early stage of the burgage cycle. To the south the Market Street sub-type (2) is a deep-burgage series more strongly truncated by fringe- belt develoFment and affected considerably by the burgage cycle. Most parts of the series have reached a mature stage of repletion characteristic of the climax phase, while some have already run through the recessive phase and are now severely reduced in area, with an increase in urban fallow. To the west the Fenkle Street sub-type (3) presents a series of the same complexion but more

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FIGURE 20--Alnwick-Types of plan-units. (i) Medieval High Street Layout, with triangular market (Alnwick Type). 1 Deep-Burgage series, Bondgate sub-type. 2 Deep-Burgage series, Market Street sub-type. 3 Deep-Burgage series, Fenkle Street sub-type. 4 Market concretions. 5 Shallow-Burgage series.

(ii) Medieval 'Suburbium'.

(iii) Simple High Street Layout. 6 Deep-Burgage series, Canongate sub-type.

(iv) Extramural Borough Street, with special siting.

(v) Closed Fringe Belt, with consequent ring-road. 7 Castle complex (modified pre-urban nucleus). 8 Castle Grounds. 9 Intramura.

10 Extramural with high building coverage. 11 Extramural with low building coverage.

(vi) Traditional Arterial Ribbons. 12 Traditional plot series, largely unaltered. 13 Traditional plot series, truncated and residual. 14 Complex double ribbon on traditional basis.

(vii) Later Alterations of Old Town. 15 Urban fallow (cleared sites). 16 Adaptive redevelopment. 17 Augmentative redevelopment.

(viii) Pre-Victorian Frame Roads.

(ix) Late Georgian and Early Victorian Residential Accretions. 18 Rudimentary layout, with early cul-de-sac. 19 Developed rectilinear layout.

(x) Mid- and Late Victorian Residential Accretions. 20 Bye-law layout, with 'through' houses. 21 Bye-law layout, with 'tunnel-back' houses. 22 Bye-law layout, with 'tunnel-back' houses and front-gardens. 23 Bye-law layout, with detached front-gardens. 24 Bye-law layout, with 'tunnel backs' on medium-density plots. 25 Improved terrace layout with low building coverage. 26 Single and double ribbon with large (detached or semi-detached) houses. 27 Complementary plot development, with modern completion.

(xi) Modern Residential Accretions. 28 High-density layout, with back-lanes. 29 High-density layout, with mixed house types. 30 Old-style layout, with semi-detached houses. 31 Old-style layout, as repletive development. 32 Post-war emergency housing estate. 33 Old-style layout, with staggered building lines. 34 New-style layout, with mixed house types. 35 New-style layout, as repletive development. 36 Double ribbon with uniform building line. 37 Single ribbon with staggered building line.

(xii) Composite Ribbons without Traditional Plots. 38 Late Georgian and Early Victorian terrace component. 39 Late Georgian and Early Victorian component with detached houses. 26 Mid- and Late Victorian component with large houses (see (x) 26). 40 Mid- and Late Victorian component with medium-sized houses. 41 Modern component with uniform building line.

(xiii) Intermediate (a) and Outer (b) Fringe Belts. 42 Industries and public utilities. 43 Public institutions and services. 44 Residential plots with small or medium-sized houses. 45 Residential plots with large houses. 46 Open spaces (including Alnwick Moor). 47 Allotments and nurseries. 48 Land reserved for public institutions and services. 49 Land reserved for industries.

(xiv) Farmsteads and Other Agricultural Buildings.

TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS 109

extensively truncated by fringe-belt development or effaced by the completion of the burgage cycle. Its chief trait, therefore, is its reduction in area to a truly residual form with jagged outline. The deep-burgage series on the south side of Pottergate, though genetically somewhat different, is so much like the Fenkle Street series in its present reduced state that it may be put under the same sub- type.

Within the Central Triangle the Market concretions (4) present a very different pattern, arising from their origin as later building colonization on the original market-place. As such they may be regarded as a frequent, though not invariable, adjunct of High Street layouts. A close-grained pattern of small squat plots arranged in tiny conformal street-blocks and a building coverage varying from 91.2 to 100 are its chief features.

Finally, there is the Shallow-Burgage series (5) on the north side of Potter- gate and its junction with Narrowgate, distinct from the deep-burgage series of the borough core and most likely late medieval and early post-medieval. It has also been subject to replacement, repletion and slum clearance, though on a much more moderate scale.

Other Traditional Plan Types within the Old Town

The widened street space of Bailiffgate with its two shallow plot series forms the medieval 'suburbium' (ii) having once served special feudal and military purposes. Its pattern of shallow 'tenement' plots has remained virtually unaltered, truncation being quite absent. Moderate replacement and repletion are other characteristics and render the Bailiffgate area distinct as a compact and hcmogeneous unit.

To the north-west of Bailiffgate the street space of Canongate preserves the memory of another medieval borough with a High Street layout but of the more common simple pattern (iii). A single street, sometimes widened to serve its double function of accommodating market activities as well as through traffic, is lined on either side with a series of deep burgages. Canongate, however, is now bereft of nearly all its ancient burgages and in its northern part is no longer a public highway. Only the middle of its east side retains a Deep-Burgage series in residual form but distinguishable from Fenkle Street as the Canongate sub- type (6) because of the absence of truncation and repletion, and the very small amount of replacement.

To the north of Bailiffgate the street space of Walkergate is the modem successor of a medieval Extramural Borough Street with special siting (iv). Once endowed with its burgages occupied by the fullers, it is now more thoroughly deprived of its ancient plot pattern than the neighbouring Canongate. Therefore, the street space and one or two traditional plot dominants remain as virtually the only residual features, the remainder of the plan consisting of a rather irregular plot pattern of more recent age.

110 TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS

The Inner Fringe Belt

The Inner Fringe Belt with its ancient fixation line and consequent ring road represents a separate major plan type, forming an uninterrupted zone round the Ancient Borough and Bailiffgate, i.e. a Closed Fringe Belt (v). It shows great irregularity in structure and outline because of its peculiar mode of evolution. It owes its individuality as a plan type as well as its areal coherence to the grouping of its plots and their dominants along the consequent ring road, and to the contrast it provides with the more homogeneous plan types on either side. Indeed, heterogeneity is one of its main features, notably as regards plot sizes and types as well as their grouping. This enables several sub-types to be distinguished.

To the north-east of the Ancient Borough where the fixation line is absent there is the Castle complex (7), essentially a medieval pre-urban nucleus in the qualified sense appropriate to the case of Alnwick. Its plan consists of a Norman castle with later modifications and considerable additions which have extended the area covered by this sub-type south-westward as far as Narrow- gate. Even in its modern form, however, the original arrangement of a keep and two outer wards is still recognizable.

Outside the castle, the private open space of the Castle Grounds (8) forms another sub-type. Traditionally associated with the pre-urban nucleus, it varies in plan features from the plain pasture of Barneyside north and east of the castle to the ornamental Castle Gardens in the south-east. The latter are at present subjected to a great change in function as a forestry nursery which in due course may have morphological results.

On the other sides of the Ancient Borough the fixation line and its conse- quent ring road separate further sub-types. The Intramural (9) is generally close-grained owing most of its area to the tail truncation of ancient burgages. Small dwelling-houses form the majority of plot dominants on the derivative plots, though industrial and institutional types are also well represented. Out- side the ring road the Inner Fringe Belt presents two sub-types distinguished by the relative amount of buildings. The Extramural with high building coverage (10) comprises groups of industrial and commercial plots or small houses in the west, south and east. The western, exclusively industrial group owes its type and location to the preceding industrial specialization of the adjoining intramural. The southern group emerged as a fringe-belt aureole during the growth of the Howick Street layout. Plots vary from medium sizes for industrial purposes to small and smallest sizes for dwelling-houses. The Extramural with low building coverage (11) on the other hand has medium and large-sized plots with institu- tional buildings or large houses as plot dominants or open spaces without buildings such as those to the north of Bailiffgate.

TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS 111

The Traditional Arterial Ribbons

The Traditional Arterial Ribbons (vi) preserve the original arterial street spaces substantially though with varying modification of the street-lines. Their associated double series of plots have been affected differentially by later alterations giving rise to three sub-types.

The first two belong to the same double ribbon of Upper Clayport Street. Here one side consists of a Traditional plot series (12) only slightly altered by slum clearance and tail truncation in the case of one plot. The other side pre- sents the same type of series but severely reduced to a residual form (13) by slum clearance which has shortened the series and by tail truncation which has left only the ancient plot heads.

Bondgate Without presents an altogether different picture. Here the whole double ribbon forms a single sub-type, the Complex double ribbon (14). Though traditional plot lines are preserved in fair numbers, the broken street-lines, as well as the varying shapes and sizes of plots, indicate considerable change and genetic complexity. Few, if any, plots are very old in their present form. Parent plots, derivative plots, diminished and augmented plots are all discernible in the present boundary pattern. Moreover, replacement and repletion have been taking place for some time, but have affected the area very unevenly, repletive absorption being a significant, if localized, feature. A few plots have been only slowly occupied by buildings for special reasons, thus experiencing late com- plementary development. There is certainly a striking morphological contrast between Upper Clayport Street and Bondgate Without. The relatively static and in parts even recessive situation in the former has tended to preserve traditional features more intact or at least in recognizable form. The busy thoroughfare of the latter, forming part of the Great North Road between the centre of Alnwick and the railway station, presents a bewildering variety of street-line adjustments, plot shapes, building shapes and sizes as well as building coverage.

Modern Plan-Units within the Old Town

With the exception of the Inner Fringe Belt and the market concretions the plan types described so far may be called traditional in as much as they are all based on a street-system originating in the Middle Ages and associated with a more or less contemporary plot pattern, usually one of burgages. The growth of the market concretions and of the intramural of the Inner Fringe Belt repre- sented the first type of alteration in this traditional plan. Both conform to their morphological frame and in this respect differ from those Later Alterations (vii) that have been associated with the completion of the burgage cycle in various parts of the Old Town. Where the cycle has only just been completed the Urban fallow (15) of slum-cleared sites represents temporary voids in the plan. This occurs in the Ancient Borough, where it reaches its maximum extent, in the Inner Fringe Belt and in the Clayport Arterial Ribbon.

112 TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS

In several cases, however, the urban fallow has been substituted already by redevelopment in two forms: Adaptive redevelopment (16) which dominates outside the Ancient Borough and Augmentative redevelopment (17).

Late Georgian and Early Victorian Residential Accretions

The plan types discussed so far have been subject to more or less sustained processes of internal change or are altogether products of such processes. With but two exceptions the peripheral accretions outside the Old Town have developed on a much simpler principle, involving straightforward growth by areal expansion but little if any internal change.

Internal variety is found only in composite roadside ribbons and fringe belts, which are best treated as separate major plan types even though the com- ponents of roadside ribbons form clear period sub-types. In both cases develop- ment has extended over more than one morphological period.

The relative siting of the accretions has been largely guided by arterial roads and field lanes that existed before the Victorian, and in most cases before the Georgian, era. As a whole, therefore, these Pre-Victorian Frame Roads (viii) constitute independent elements in the present town plan, although functionally as well as morphologically individual stretches and/or their frontages have been incorporated in piecemeal fashion into adjoining plan-units.

The Late Georgian and Early Victorian Residential Accretions (ix) are the first major group of accretionary plan types. The Rudimentary layout (18) exemplified by the small cul-de-sac of South Street (Fig. 15a) is the earliest sub- type, and contrasts with the Developed rectilinear layout (19) which comprises a more complete street-system and continues its growth into the Late Victorian period (Fig. 15f).

Mid- and Late Victorian Residential Accretions

Among the Mid- and Late Victorian Residential Accretions (x) the following sub-types have been recognized: the Bye-law layout with 'through' houses (20) exemplified by East Parade

(Fig. 15b); the Bye-law layout with 'tunnel-back' houses on the street-line (21) such as

King Street (Fig. 15c); the Bye-law layout with 'tunnel-back' houses behind front-gardens (22) such as

Duke Street and Bridge Street (Fig. 15b); the Bye-law terrace with detached front-gardens (23) on the principle of some

northern mining villages; the Bye-law layout with 'tunnel-back' houses on medium-density plots (24),

basically similar to the development in Bridge Street but with more generous plots;

the Improved terrace layout with low building coverage (25); and

TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS 113

the Single or double ribbon with large houses (26) as on the south side of Alnmouth Road (Fig. 15e).

Special site circumstances in the Prudhoe Street area (39 and 43 on Fig. 21) have produced a type of development which is neither layout nor ribbon, but the filling-in of small pieces of land that had been retarded in their building development. It may be characterized as Complementary plot development (27).

Modern Residential Accretions

Modern Residential Accretions (xi) account for the largest area and the greatest number of plan sub-types. The High-density layout with back-lanes (28) represented by the single example of the Oak Street/Beech Street area (Fig. 19c) has already been discussed as a special case. The High-density layout of mixed terraces and semi-detached houses (29), as found in the York Road area, is fairly closely related in morphological characteristics. The majority of pre-war housing estates, however, belong to the Old-style layout with semi- detached houses (30) characterized by uniform building lines and little attempt at an architectural grouping (Fig. 19f). The peculiar site of the West Acres estate with its residual plot dominant warrants separate recognition of the Old- style layout with mixed house types in repletive development (31).

Plan sub-types of the post-war period begin with the Post-war emergency housing estate (32), of which Augur Terrace East with its prefabricated bungalows is the only example in Alnwick (Fig. 19h). The post-war estate at Barresdale (76 in Fig. 21), though of pre-war character, shows an attempt at grouping by breaking the building lines. It may be distinguished as the Old- style layout of semi-detached houses with staggered building lines (33). The majority of post-war estates, however, are arranged in the new style with culs-de- sac conceived as an architectural composition, often with a central open space, and with varied and more carefully grouped houses (Fig. 19a, b and g). They form the New-style layout of mixed house types (34). Again the special site circumstances at Ravensmede (Fig. 19e) have resulted in a variant, the New- style layout of mixed house types in repletive development (35).

Modern accretions in Alnwick occur also as ribbons. Two forms are entirely of recent origin and so homogeneous in their elements that they con- stitute full plan-units. They are the Double ribbon with uniform building line (36) (Fig. 19d) and the Single ribbon with staggered building line (37; No. 80 in Fig. 21).

Composite Ribbons

Among the post-medieval accretions of heterogeneous structure the Composite Ribbons without Traditional Plots (xii) form residential plan types. They differ from layouts and simple ribbons not only in structure but also in having developed over more than one morphological period. They appear as

114 TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS

single plan types in Figure 20, but the various period components have also been indicated (38, 39, 26, 40 and 41).

The Intermediate and Outer Fringe Belts

In terms of plan morphology the Intermediate (xiii (a)) and the Outer Fringe Belts (xiii (b)) contrast strongly with other units, much more so than the Inner Fringe Belt since they lack its areal coherence and are more coarse-grained. The mixture of functions they represent is thus rendered prominent in the plan, and the different functions become the most convenient criterion of morpho- logical classification. In Alnwick their usually large land-use units do not fall into recognizable plan-units of recurrent pattern and general significance. Even where smaller plots with the same function are grouped together, as in the case of the industrial and commercial sites on South Road (111, 114 and 116 in Fig. 21), this produces no plan-unit that could be characterized more signifi- cantly than in terms of function. The components of the two outer fringe belts are hardly plan types in the normal sense, especially as they consist often of a single but large plot. In Figure 20 they are defined by function, either in single plots or in groups of plots.

Industries and public utilities (42) occupy plots varying in shape and ranging in size from 0.41 to 7.23 acres. They tend to be grouped about the railway station on Wagonway Road and within the angle of railway lines on South Road. Buildings and their arrangement differ greatly from one unit to another, most plots having several buildings, but relatively large units of simple rectangular shape are prominent. The building coverage varies considerably. A special fringe feature is provided by the two railway lines in the south-east which run largely on embankments. The Wooler line is now dismantled but its embankment still limits the southward extension of the built-up area.

Public institutions and services (43) also differ considerably in plot size and character. Alnwick Infirmary (70 in Fig. 21) occupies a site of 0.7 acre with virtually only one building at a building coverage of 28.5. On the other hand the Duke's School (58 in Fig. 21) lies on a plot of 10.8 acres with a building coverage of 3. The newly enlarged Alnwick Secondary Modern School (123 on Fig. 21) with a greater spread of building blocks in a modern design has a plot of 11.54 acres with a building coverage of 9.79. These schools with their large private open spaces more than any other land-use units have helped to give Alnwick's accretions their open structure.

Residential plots with small or medium-sized houses (44) tend to occur in small groups in a few places within the two outer fringe belts. They may be complementary to public services or represent unattached residential develop- ment.

Residential plots with large houses (45), usually with more or less extensive ornamental grounds, have sprung up on the urban fringe in the countryside throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some became the nuclei of

TYPES OF PLAN-UNITS 115

composite ribbons or repletive layouts and were absorbed by these newer plan- units, but a few retained true fringe-belt characteristics (56, 62, 72, 74, and 129 on Fig. 21).

Open spaces (46) are a frequent feature of fringe belts and vary greatly in size, functional nature, circumstances of location, and internal arrangement

Allotments and nurseries (47) are closely associated with urban fringe belts. In Alnwick the tradition of allotments in proximity to the town has been sustained by the Dukes of Northumberland since 18472 and nurseries on the well-drained light soils to the south-east of the town have been recorded on maps of Alnwick since 1827.3

Some agricultural land on the fringe has already been earmarked for urban uses, and some is in interim development. Land reserved for institutions (48) (nearly all for schools) lies entirely to the west and south-west side of the town. Land reserved for industries (49) is confined to one large block of land in the south-east (112 in Fig. 21).

Other land also retains its agricultural use though now hemmed in by urban land. Particularly associated with the fringe belts, in part even with the inner one, it breaks up the built-up area and accounts for the areal discontinuity so common in the accretions of smaller market towns.

Finally, Farmsteads and other Agricultural Building Development (xiv) are shown in Figure 20 if they are in contact with the built-up area or lie within one of the fringe belts.

REFERENCES

1Throughout this chapter Roman and Arabic numbers, unless stated otherwise, refer to the key of Figure 20. For this and the next Chapter, see also the photographs included in this volume.

2 RAWLINSON, op. cit., 50. 3Cf. Wood's Map, 1827, the Tithe Map, 1846, and the Ordnance Survey Plans of 1851, 1864,

1897 and 1921.

CHAPTER 10

THE GEOGRAPHICAL STRUCTURE OF ALNWICK'S TOWN PLAN

COMPARISON of Figures 20 and 21 shows how morphogenetic types of plan-units combine variously to form individual areas and so make up a geographical structure of morphogenetic plan-divisions. Theoretically this structure has significance only in respect of the single morphological aspect of the town plan in accordance with the purpose of this study, and should not be confused with a general regional division of Alnwick. The latter would involve fuller considera- tion of land and building uses as well as building types. In passing it may be noted, however, that actually the divisions of Alnwick's town plan do often coincide with urban regions of general significance. In small towns the topo- graphical discrepancy between the established plan and fabric on the one hand and new uses invading and adapting it on the other does not occur on nearly the same scale as in the inner integuments of larger towns.'

The plan-divisions of Alnwick group themselves into four orders. Those of the lowest order are marked in Figure 21 by Arabic numerals and can be readily distinguished as plan-type units.

The identification of divisions of the third order, marked by small letters, is also relatively easy as they are generally groups of type units, sometimes repre- senting type units of higher order. But these groups are occasionally discon- tinuous, forming 'regional' units only in the sense of accretionary zones, as in the case of the subdivisions within each fringe belt.

The divisions of the second order, marked by Roman numerals, present greater difficulties, at least in the outer accretions, because of the tendency of the fringe belts to disrupt and interpenetrate other built-up areas. Nevertheless, criteria of relative internal homogeneity in terms of plan morphology definitely distinguish the fringe belts from the kernel and the residential accretions. The divisions of the second order are also functionally distinct and in that respect group themselves into a core and integuments in Smailes' sense."

The two divisions of the first order, denoted by capital letters in the legend of Figure 21 only, are comparatively straightforward as they present the familiar contrast between old kernel and new accretions.

It may be added that, contrary to what might be expected, unit boundaries occasionally run along the middle of a road, especially if the road pre-dates the adjacent plots and houses as the older frame roads do in the outer accretions of the town.

A first broad division of the street-plan is that into the Old Town and Inner Fringe Belt (A), where traditional lineaments have made a major contribution,

116

IXx X34 THE PLAN C 13

-4 BOUNDARY O

47 Ild - PLAN DIVISIC

IXxs34 iiif23 22 PLAN

DIVISI(

Vlk 48 PLAN DIVISI

q23 1llf

II IIV

132 .9*5922 22

I.w.: 24418

84

27 3 e

2275

"38*l l.

i l l 3 12 "*4

22 .?5 2

•"* .* . . . V II

IXi 4I , I0* ,0

129 57 Ills*-

12.

IXw 124 .. IXw• 27 125 120

??7b ??r ? ? ? 2

FIGURE 21

\I DIVISIONS OF ALNWICK

DARY OF OLD TOWN & INNER FRINGE BELT (A) DIVISIONS OF SECOND ORDER (I - IX) DIVISIONS OF THIRD ORDER (a x )

DIVISIONS OF FOURTH ORDER ( - 134)

F• OLD TOWN

75 L:.II INTERMEDIATE ALNWICK

V110o L::' OUTER ALNWICK 74

V110o73 SCALE OF FEET 0 500 1O00 1500 2000

Vil 72

V10

IIV 11 /u

_107 l b . . ' .

S107 . .104 .. c9 .

108 ...I04 .Villu 119 . . 105. I.O

IIa

117

114 I 111

1Xv

113

A. Old Town and Inner Fringe I. Ancient Borough and Bai

(a) Ancient Borough. 1 Central Triangle. 2 Bondgate North Side 3 Market Street South 4 Correction House Cl

Area. 5 Fenkle Street West S 6 Clayport Clearance A 7 Bird-and-Bush Red

ment. 8 Memorial Cottages

Redevelopment. 9 Pottergate South Sidc

10 Pottergate Row Cl Area.

11 Pottergate/Narrowga North Side.

12 Pottergate Clearance (b) Bailiffgate

II. Canongate/Walkergate. (c) Canongate.

13 Canongate North. 14 Central Canongate. 15 Canongate South.

(d) Walkergate. III. Inner Fringe Belt.

(e) Intramural. 16 Northumberland Stre

Intramural. 17 Dispensary Street Int

mural. 18 Dispensary Street C1

Area. 19 Green Batt Intramur 20 Roxburgh Place Cl

Area. (f) Extramural.

21 Alnwick Castle. 22 Castle Grounds. 23 North-Western Extr 24 Western Industrial A 25 Western Green Batt

mural. 26 Eastern Green Batt

mural. 27 Hotspur Street Extr 28 Hotspur Street Clear

Area. IV. Upper Clayport Street.

(g) Upper Clayport North 29 Upper Clayport No]

Side. 30 Stamp's Yard Cleara

Area. 31 Grosvenor Terrace/C

Terrace. (h) Upper Clayport South

32 Upper Clayport Sout Side.

33 Fire Station/Monkhc Terrace. V. Bondgate Without.

B. Outer Accretions. VI. Intermediate Alnwick.

(i) Lisburn Street/Prudhoe 34 King Street.

FIGURE 21-The plan divisions of Alnwick. nner Fringe Belt. igh and Bailiffgate. rough. riangle. North Side.

treet South Side. n House Clearance

-reet West Side. Clearance Area. -Bush Redevelop-

1 Cottages lopment. e South Side. e Row Clearance

e/Narrowgate Side. e Clearance Area.

'alkergate.

te North. ?anongate. te South.

Belt.

berland Street ural. ry Street Intra-

ry Street Clearance

ttt Intramural. h Place Clearance

Castle. rounds. estern Extramural. Industrial Area. Green Batt Extra-

Green Batt Extra-

Street Extramural. Street Clearance

?ort Street. yport North Side. layport North-East

Yard Clearance

)r Terrace/Clive

yport South Side. layport South-West

ion/Monkhouse

thout.

Alnwick. eet/Prudhoe Street. .et.

35 Howick Street. 36 Howick Street South-West

Side. 37 Percy Terrace/Prudhoe

Street West. 38 South Street. 39 Bungalows near Duke's

School. 40 Croft Place. 41 Hotspur Place. 42 Hotspur Place South-East. 43 Prudhoe Street East. 44 Stott Street.

(j) Lower Howling Lane. 45 Windsor Gardens. 46 Alwynside.

VII. Intermediate Fringe Belt. (k) West Demesne Belt.

47 Canongate Allotments. 48 West Demesne Agricultural

Residual. 49 Ratten Row Allotments. 50 Alnwick Cricket Ground. 51 Stamps Close Agricultural

Residual. (1) Upper Clayport Belt.

52 Clive Nurseries. 53 Lisburn Terrace North Side. 54 Cadet Huts Site. 55 Lisburn Terrace South Side.

(m) Southern Intermediate Belt. 56 Bellevue. 57 Dunder Hill Allotments. 58 Duke's School. 59 New Infant School. 60 Policemen's Houses. 61 Police Station and Court

House. 62 Croft House. 63 Prudhoe Street Tennis

Courts. (n) Wagonway Road Belt.

64 Auction Mart. 65 Houses South of Council

House. 66 Council House Complex. 67 Alnwick Creamery. 68 Alnwick Station.

(o) Allerburn Belt. 69 Tenantry Column Grounds. 70 Alnwick Infirmary. 71 Spring Gardens. 72 Hillcrest. 73 Allerburn. 74 Allerburn House. 75 Leeks Field Allotments.

VIII. Outer Alnwick. (p) Upper Howling Lane.

76 Barresdale. 77 St. Thomas's Crescent. 78 Oak Street/Beech Street. 79 Clayport Gardens.

(q) Southern Alnwick. 80 The Dunterns. 81 Swansfield Park Road. 82 Blakelaw Road. 83 Greensfield Avenue.

84 New Wagonway Road Estate.

(r) Wagonway Road South. 85 St. George's Crescent. 86 York Road North Side. 87 Aydon Crescent. 88 Augur Flats. 89 York Crescent/York Road

South Side. 90 Sea View Terrace. 91 Augur Terrace West. 92 Augur Terrace East.

(s) Wagonway Road North. 93 Queen Street. 94 Swansfield Park Road

North-East. 95 Bridge Street/Duke Street. 96 East Parade.

(t) Belvedere/Ravenslaw. 97 Aydon Gardens. 98 Belvedere Terrace. 99 Ravenslaw.

(u) Alnmouth Road. 100 Alnmouth Road West. 101 Alnbank/Freelands. 102 Ravensmede. 103 West Acres. 104 Central Alnmouth Road. 105 Alnmouth Road East.

IX. Outer Fringe Belt. (v) Newcastle Road Belt.

106 Windy Edge Farm. 107 Royal Oak. 108 Royal Oak Nurseries. 109 N.C.C. and Esso Depots. 110 Alnmouth Line Embank-

ment. 111 Alnwick Gasworks and

Laundry. 112 Stanley Flats Agricultural

Residual. 113 Alnwick Cemetery. 114 Alnwick Saw Mill. 115 Sawmill Cottages. 116 A.R.D.C., Shell and Agricul-

tural Machinery Depots. 117 Site of new Fire Station. 118 Firemen's Houses. 119 Wooler Line Embankment.

(w) Southern Outer Belt. 120 South Wagonway Allot-

ments. 121 Alnwick Football Ground. 122 Old Fever Hospital. 123 Alnwick Secondary Modern

School. 124 Blakelaw Reservoir. 125 Broad Close Agricultural

Residual. (x) Western Outer Belt.

126 Hope House. 127 Camphill Cottage. 128 Swansfield Park. 129 Swansfield House. 130 Sawnsfield West. 131 St. Thomas's Farm. 132 Alnwick Moor. 133 Shepherd's Rest. 134 Hulne Park.

GEOGRAPHICAL STRUCTURE OF ALNWICK'S TOWN PLAN 117

and the Outer Accretions (B), where modern lineaments determine the plan character in spite of the influence of older frame features.

The Old Town forms genetically the 'kernel' and functionally the 'core', though it lies excentrically in relation to the later accretions. Its northern part still reaches the outer limit of the built-up area. But here a section of it (II) is also of a purely residential character and does not form part of the functional core.

Apart from the Inner Fringe Belt (III) and the two Traditional Arterial Ribbons (IV, V), the subdivisions of the Old Town lie side by side rather than in concentric zones. This is in accordance with their medieval genesis whereby each division represented a separate community, distinct in functional character and, therefore, with its own site requirements. Only the Inner Fringe Belt and the Arterial Ribbons initiated the theme of concentric zonal arrangement and that, of course, only after the medieval kernel had been clearly defined by the line of the town-wall. The two ribbons represent the first accretionary growth, the extramural of the Inner Fringe Belt (III(f)) following later. This makes the Inner Fringe Belt a transitional zone between the Old Town and the Outer Accretions as explained previously. But the fact that it is a morphological division in its own right, unified about its ancient fixation line and dominated by this as well as by the abundant traditional traits of its intramural, renders it expedient to group this belt with the Old Town.

In contrast, the Outer Accretions fall more readily into four roughly con- centric zones: two mainly residential zones form Intermediate (VI) and Outer Alnwick (VIII) and are more or less separated by the Intermediate Fringe Belt (VII) and surrounded by the Outer Fringe Belt (IX). This arrangement, how- ever, does not mean that the whole of Intermediate Alnwick is older than Outer Alnwick, because the factors involved in the growth of these two zones have been complex and their combination has varied. Thus the development of Lower Howling Lane (VI(j)) within Intermediate Alnwick is more recent than much of Outer Alnwick on the same side because of the retardation caused locally by conditions of ownership. Conversely, much of the eastern half of Outer Alnwick, though about a mile from the centre of the town, is relatively old, since land was made available for building earlier.

Conditions of ownership have also influenced the configuration and specific morphological character of different parts of these zones. In combina- tion with relief they account for the great gap in Outer Alnwick about Swans- field House (129) and Bellevue (56). Combined with the already established fringe-belt features of the railway station (68), the former workhouse (66) and the cattle mart (64), they are responsible for the Victorian development of Wagonway Road North (s) and therefore for the compactness of this area. This contrasts markedly with Wagonway Road South (r), and even more strongly with Southern Alnwick (q), which could be called 'Ribbon Alnwick' as a result of the remarkable degree of interpenetration of the larger schools, which are special fringe features. The concentration of industrial sites in the

I

118 GEOGRAPHICAL STRUCTURE OF ALNWICK'S TOWN PLAN

south-eastern part of the Outer Fringe Belt, initiated by the location of the present gasworks (111) and the sawmill (114), and aided by the presence of the main road and the railway, is also notable.

If, then, the four divisions of the Outer Accretions show great internal complexity in form as well as age, nevertheless they attain a measure of coher- ence because the mechanism of fringe-belt development has caused them to form zones.

REFERENCES

1 Cf. SMAILES, The geography of towns, 92. 2 SMAILES, op. cit., 90-5.

CONCLUSION

THIS investigation is an attempt to explain the present structure of a town plan by examining its development.

The complexity of the existing street-system, plot pattern and building arrangement poses a difficult methodological problem. Instead of working backwards from the present confused picture our morphological analysis has followed the growth of the plan. In this way it has been possible to obtain a clearer conception of how the plan has become the cumulative result of a diverse process kept going by successive functional impulses within the broad scheme of morphological periods.

In terms of plan lineaments this accumulation clearly is not to be under- stood as a simple superposition. Morphological frames have been respected in varying degree from one period to another and in different localities and have persisted or suffered accordingly. Moreover, if some changes have been merely cumulative, others have rather been cyclic. On the one hand, simple, seemingly static additions to the town plan, like most of the more recent residential layouts, can be readily recognized. On the other hand, the cyclic forms are more evasive, and only by following the morphological processes themselves can the diversity of features be understood.

The scope of this study has been deliberately restricted in two respects. Limitation to a single major aspect, the town plan, has produced some funda- mental, if specialized, concepts. These can claim significance in morphological analysis well beyond the case investigated here and should help to form a basis for comparative studies. Limitation to a single town has served to develop these concepts in a clearer and simpler context with due regard to plan detail, though inevitably it has limited their choice to some extent. It has also pro- vided an example of the structure of a town plan in terms of morphogenetic units and of plan divisions based on the latter.

The theory of plan analysis developed here opens a wide field of research in two directions. In the first place it needs to be connected with a full investi- gation of the associated patterns of land use and building types in order to produce a complete interpretation of the townscape. Secondly, it should be extended to cover different functional types of towns, as well as towns of different culture areas.

Although Alnwick is only a small town, in accordance with its function as a rural service centre, its long history has rendered the physical arrangement of its built-up area more interesting and productive morphologically than its highly individual and partly confused plan might lead one to suspect at first. It serves to demonstrate that town-plan analysis on evolutionary lines, though it empha- sizes only one major aspect, is essential in urban morphology and that a great deal of work remains to be done.

119

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