Tewkesbury was seen from the skies back in ‘84
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ON July 24, 1984 a staff photographer from the Echo named Richard Pasco was dispatched to Tewkesbury.
The golden cockerel atop the Abbey’s tower that shows which way the wind is blowing had been returned to its lofty perch following a refurbishment and Richard was there to capture on film the newly preened weathervane in all its reconditioned glory.
Having huffed and puffed up the 205 step spiral staircase to the top of the tower, it seemed a shame not to take advantage of the panorama. So the photographer took the bird’s eye view pictures you see reproduced here, along with the other scenes about town. They were shortly afterwards used in an Echo photo feature called Spotlight on Tewkesbury.
And what a photogenic town centre it is, which is why it is one of the few in the country that is a protected conservation area in its entirety.
The aerial view that looks over the rooftops towards the junction of Church Street, Barton Street and the High Street reveals the delightful hotchpotch of buildings that squeeze shoulder to shoulder along the main streets.
Many of them date from the closing years of the seventeenth century, although some of the timber framed buildings were given a face lift of fashionable brick in Georgian times and look less venerable.
In the 1970s and 80s the architectural historian Sir Alec Clifton-taylor made three TV series for the BBC called “Six English Towns”, “Six More English Towns” and “Another Six English Towns”.
No more were made after that, presumably not because they’d run out of towns to explore, but because they couldn’t think of any more titles.
Tewkesbury featured in the first series and in it Sir Alec explained that its location at the confluence of two major rivers has always been on the one hand an advantage and on the other a constraint.
The regular floods that account for the surrounding rich agricultural land also limit the amount of dry land available for development.
The flood plain corset around Tewkesbury was responsible for the town’s maze of alleys, which dates from mediaeval and Tudor times when a network of pathways separated parcels of land (called burgages) held on a yearly rent by burgesses.
As the town expanded these burgages were built on and as many dwellings as possible were crammed onto the available dry land. Slums were the result.
Well-off people lived in the main streets. Alleys were for the poor and few of them enjoyed such niceties as mains water, sewerage, or drainage. Hand pumps were few and far between in Tewkesbury, though there’s one in Smith’s Court, off Church Street that can be seen to this day, so most alleyfolk collected water in a bucket from the river. Unfortunately, the river also served as the town sewer.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the awful living conditions, Tewkesbury’s alleyways were home to larger than life characters.
Local author John Moore, described some of these personalities in his “Portrait of Elmbury”. Double Alley was home to the fiery Old Sal and rogue extraordinary Nobler Price. In contrast, a man named Lemes who shared the squalor of Wilkes Alley with numerous near neighbours claimed to be the rightful king of France.
Alley names are often intriguing, Fryzers Court, Eagles Alley, Machine Court.
The names usually derived from the person, or shop at the alley’s entrance on the main road. So Davis Alley, for instance, was so called because it ran adjacent to the pork butcher George Davis, nicknamed Chitterlings George.
To complicate matters, the name of any particular alley could change quite frequently according to who was living at the main street entrance.
Fish Alley, which leaves Barton Street, probably took its title from the fishermen who lived there. But at various times it was also known as Joyces Alley, Workhouse Alley, Jeynes Alley and Bells Alley.
A century and a half ago there were 146 alleys running from Tewkesbury’s main streets. By the start of this century the number was reduced to about 50.
Then more disappeared in the 1950s and 60s until today just a dozen open ended alleys and 30-odd courts (an alley closed at one end) remain.
Black and white architecture is a term often used to describe the wooden framed buildings seen in Tewkesbury. But until the 19 century when pitch and tar distilled from coal came onto the market permanent black as a colour wasn’t available.
For a true idea of how Tewkesbury looked before the Victorians pitched in, look at Abbey Cottages, the row in Church Street that includes the John Moore Countryside Museum. The timbers aren’t black, but natural oak.