The English high street: Marlborough, Wiltshire – ‘Towns do not come much better than this’
Christopher Howse is travelling the nation to speak to local people about their high street. How it has changed and what they miss… This week, Christopher explores Marlborough in Wiltshire.
“Here’s a distinguished man,” said an old gent in a panama hat who had been talking with a friend – a retired colonel from the RAMC – on the sunny side of Marlborough High Street.
He meant me, for there is a good overlap between The Telegraph and Marlborough. And there is another overlap with Waitrose, of which more later – a key to the success of the high street here. I wished I also had a hat, to raise in response to the welcome.
“The King, when he was Prince of Wales,” said the gent, “visited Marlborough and said: ‘Towns do not come much better than this.’” It is absolutely true that he said so, in just those words, in 2004, and perhaps the judgment was true, too.
The exceptionally wide High Street was rebuilt after a great fire in 1653, and very lovely it looks. It follows a band of chalk for three furlongs along the slope above the river Kennet. Marlborough College occupies the site of the old castle at the west end.
A peculiar feature of the High Street is what are termed pentices. A sort of veranda roof of tiles juts out above the shop windows and doors. Columns, usually in the plain Doric style, support them, making a modest colonnade along the street, as at the Pantiles in Tunbridge Wells. Winchester, too, has a row of ancient houses called the Pentice.
In Marlborough the pentices can provide enough shelter for little tables of coffee-drinkers, or couples looking in the shop windows. Pentices stand before the three-gabled 17th-century Merchant’s House, the town’s showpiece. The Pevsner guide for Wiltshire calls it “exuberantly vernacular”. Oddly enough, one of the few empty shops in the street is the former Clarks shoe shop on the ground floor, now to let.
Just to the side of the Town Hall, a glorious pair of buildings, a clothes shop and a coffee shop, not only have pentices with columns, but, on the first floor, a series of Venetian windows.
These windows are not quite as Sebastiano Serlio, the Renaissance architect, envisaged them. They have the same round-headed window in the middle flanked by a pair of square-headed windows. But here, the glazing bars of the middle window intersect in the upper part to make a pretty Gothic pattern. There are four of these Venetian windows in a row, the outer pair each folded around a projecting bay. The effect is inventive and satisfying.
I am convinced that such beauty makes for happier town-dwelling. More practically, the width of the street, which traditionally allowed a big market to be held, today allows parking on each side and down the middle. People can come and park for a few minutes while dropping into a shop.
There is also parking round the back of Waitrose. The supermarket’s presence is not immediately apparent in the row of buildings on the south side of the street, because its entrance is in a stone-fronted building that looks Georgian. In fact, it was constructed in old-fashioned style in 1859 as the Corn Exchange by the local bigwig the Marquess of Ailesbury.
Exchanging corn became a decreasing demand and in 1915 it was turned into a cinema, the Electric Picture Hall. The cinema closed in 1974. (Today, the Parade Cinema thrives in a lovely brick-fronted building off the High Street, and, in addition to new film releases, shows relays from the National Theatre, Royal Opera House and Royal Ballet.)
Waitrose was then able to build its supermarket unobtrusively, and provide parking at the back, because of a decision taken nearly 1,000 years ago. Property along the High Street was possessed by a Norman system called burgage tenure. The parcels of land behind the houses were long and thin. This has allowed infilling in the past few decades, with some housing and the celebrated Waitrose.
If shoppers come into town to use the supermarket, they use other shops too. Tesco, on the other side of the river, brings less easy benefit to the High Street from footfall. Emma, the young woman behind the bar in the Green Dragon, walks round to Waitrose for her weekly shop, reasoning that the quality makes it cheaper than Tesco.
The High Street is of a variety of pleasantly old buildings in a local style. The most popular frontage is tile-hung, often with scalloped tiles. Some fronts are brick, again in a local style, with the headers (the narrow end of the brick) of an ash-burnt grey and the stretchers and dressings round the windows in mellow red.
In fact, many frontages conceal ancient timber-framed buildings. They weren’t all burnt down in 1653. Behind the tile-hung gable end of the White Horse Bookshop stands a timber building of the Tudor period.
I popped into the White Horse to buy some postcards. “Yes, we do accept cash,” said the woman at the till, smiling. “But we do have an issue. Lloyds Bank is closing. It’s the last bank in Marlborough, now that HSBC and Barclays have gone. I don’t know what we’ll do then. Use the Post Office, perhaps. But with no one going to the bank, it’s less pairs of feet going past our door.”
My own pair of feet took me past the Norman church of St Mary’s at the east end of the High Street, behind the definitely Edwardian Town Hall of 1902 (which just about gets away with being in such distinguished architectural company).
The church was burnt in 1653 too, but the shell survived, restored with post-fire elements such as neoclassical columns on the south side of the nave. You can still see fire-reddened Norman stonework.
Fires didn’t stop in 1653. The Polly Tearooms, where I had a rather rich slice of cake, has no upper floors because of one in 1966. Its next-door neighbour was rebuilt then, in a bleak, bulky way, to earn the disapproval of Pevsner as “the worst intrusion in the High Street”.
Beyond St Mary’s, the London Road is an extension of the High Street running down to the bridge over the river. Here I found a marvellous old-fashioned butcher’s, Sumbler Bros, in business for more than a century. “It’s the oldest continuously trading shop in Marlborough,” the green-aproned owner, Steve Frost, told me.
It’s the sort of butcher’s that is on first-name terms with the livestock that provide its joints. Half a dozen butchers were busy behind the long refrigerated display counter with ranks of sausages, ruddy chunks of braising steak, chubby chickens, with shop-made pies and cooked ham segregated in their own chilled compartment.
I could see that if you were not keen on meat, this was not the place to be. But a woman was animatedly buying some vacuum-packed flattened-out marinated chicken for the weekend barbecue. “The children love them.”
Next to Sumbler’s is a former pub, now flats, with a curious name: the Five Alls. The big sign that hung over the stable-yard entrance showed a Soldier (I fight for all), a Priest (I pray for all), the King (I rule all), a Lawyer (I plead for all) and a Farmer (I pay for all). Even the iron bar on which it hung has gone now, though the building remains listed as of special architectural and historic interest, like most of the High Street.
Five Alls Court is the name of the stop where I waited for the bus back to Swindon, as Marlborough station closed in 1961. The traffic was not heavy, even though this is a through route. The M4 a few miles away is the east-west artery.
As the bus bucketed over potholes on the straight switchback road, I pondered the good fortune of Marlborough to be historic, prosperous and preserved.
The English hardly know the antiquity amid which they live. At Marlborough College, the Mound had been thought a Norman castle motte (or, popularly, Merlin’s grave). Archaeologists now date it to 2,400 BC, and, after Silbury Hill, it is the biggest Neolithic mound in Europe.
Before recent planning laws, no one made the owners of old buildings such as Marlborough’s conserve them. They throve as part of a local culture of continuing in fathers’ footsteps and emulating the fashionably desirable. Hence pentices, tile-hanging and Venetian windows. More of that, and less of generic, unrooted, unwanted shopping centres and high-rise flats would do us all good.
