A rare glimpse of 17th Century Shrewsbury

A painting of c1630 sheds light on Shrewsbury at the time of the Stuarts.

A fascinating painting has recently (December 2009) been donated to Shrewsbury Museum and Art Gallery. The image, which dates from c1630, is of Shrewsbury. It is the third oldest image of the town after the, much better known, Burghley c1575 and Speed 1610 maps. In contrast to them it is a panoramic view and not an attempt to map the whole town.
(You can look at the whole painting in much more detail by downloading a PDF version of it - click on the link below the panoramic view.)

The family of the former owners purchased the picture for £12 10s in 1939 from someone in Dogpole. With the painting came a newspaper cutting from the “Shrewsbury Chronicle” dated Friday November 24 1933. Under a photograph of the Shrewsbury panorama it states “The oil-painting from which the above picture is taken has been for more than half a century in the possession of Miss Humphreys of Dogpole Court. It was purchased at the recent sale of her effects by Raynolds and Co. Ltd., of Dogpole, who have had it cleaned and restored.” In directories of an earlier date in the century Misses E.J. and L. Humphreys lived at the Court, next door to 21 Dogpole, the Shrewsbury Club (Oak house) on one side, and the Granville Liberal Club on the other.

This painting most probably was once in the possession of the Rev. John Brickdale Blakeway, Vicar of St Mary’s, Shrewsbury from 1794 until his death in 1826. He was the author of the Sheriffs of Shropshire and co-author with the Rev. Hugh Owen of the History of Shrewsbury. J.B. Blakeway died at the Council House in Shrewsbury where no doubt the painting hung. In their History of Shrewsbury Owen and Blakeway mentioned the additional storey on the tower of the Abbey church which was depicted in “an old painting of a view of Shrewsbury” then in the possession of the Rev. Mr Blakeway. As this is the only known view of Shrewsbury showing this feature it would seem more than likely that this is the painting they were referring to.

The painting is very important for a number of reasons. It is the earliest view to show reasonable depictions of the elevations of Shrewsbury buildings; it gives an indication of the colours the town’s buildings were painted in (mostly lime-wash with some light red); and it shows structures that appear in no other view.

Precise dating of the painting is problematic but there are good clues as to a likely time frame. It can be no later than 1658, the date of Francis Sandford’s depiction of an Abbey tower shorn of an upper storey; it can be no earlier than 1630 when the main range of Shrewsbury School, now the Library, was built.

Some parts of the painting are more reliable than others. There were no buildings on the Gay Meadow until the coming of the football ground in 20th Century and yet some are shown in the view. It is likely that, in order to provide foreground artistic interest, cottages to north of the Abbey Church, or in Coleham, have been shifted a few hundred yards in a north-west direction closer to the river! Two of the smaller cottages still appear to be thatched; a sign that the town’s wealth, and its strict enforcement of fire regulations, didn’t always reach the suburbs.

The increasing wealth of the town was being expressed in the “Great Rebuilding” of the late 16th/early 17th centuries, first mooted by W.G. Hoskins. Large, often highly decorated, timber framed houses were superseding the stone courtyard mansions of the mediaeval period. The open spaces and burgage plots of the town were filling up. This process is difficult to detect here, not least because there is little evidence of timber-framing in the picture. It is hard to believe that all the houses were covered in lime plaster in 1630s so the artist must have left the timbers off. Some of the grander residences were being built in brick, and stone was also making a comeback in dwellings such as Bellstone House. The “Stone House” with its enormous chimneys can be seen here built on the line of the town walls behind St. Mary’s church.

Wealth, and increasing leisure time, is also reflected in a profusion of summer houses at the ends of gardens and belvedere’s on roofs. One of the latter, Kingston House, St Alkmund’s Square, survives and is probably that to the right of the tower of St Alkmund’s in the painting. It is also clear that chimney building, a process already well underway at the time of the Burghley map, was almost complete. This reflects a revolution in domestic organisation. There was a move away from hall houses, open to the rafters, as the focus of most aspects of family life to a more private world, of separate rooms with ceilings for different activities, which was to be the norm until more “open –plan” arrangements returned in the mid-20th Century.

Shrewsbury in 1630 remained a town still largely contained by its mediaeval walls. The line of the wall behind Dogpole, prominent in the painting, is known although most of it has disappeared. Intriguingly there is a round tower on it that doesn’t appear in other views. How short-lived this feature was is unknown. The painting is not alone in depicting the town walls in a light colour. Grey sandstone does appear in the walls today, which is predominantly composed of red Keele-bed sandstone, and the one surviving tower is constructed of grey Grinshill stone. This does beg the question of whether the walls themselves were treated with lime-wash perhaps for reasons of display.

Other identifiable buildings include, of course, the churches, from left to right being Holy Cross (The Abbey), Old St. Chad’s, St. Julian’s, St. Alkmund’s and St. Mary’s. The newly built main block of Shrewsbury School (now the library) can be glimpsed as can the rear of the Council House. Shrewsbury Castle, at that time derelict, is shown with the great tower which preceded Laura’s tower built by Thomas Telford in 1780s. The building with two brick chimneys to the left of St Mary’s Church close to the town wall may be the former College of St. Mary’s closed at the time of the reformation in 1540s and by this time in private hands.The crenellated structure in the foreground was probably a remnant of the medieval Dominican friary.

There are some surprises; the Abbey church is shown with an extra storey in grey stone. This makes sense of a document of 1499 referring to new works on the ”steeple in the abbey of Salop” and the fact that Francis Sandford’s drawing of 1658 shows a tower that has clearly been sliced off. The extra storey appears to have been removed during the English Civil War, perhaps to prevent its use as a cannon or viewing platform to potential besiegers.

It is not known where the artist’s vantage point was but the cupola of Whitehall is a contender. More likely perhaps is that the artist used a variety of vantage points to create a composite image.