About our expert
Jonathan Foyle is a Historian of Architecture, Art and Culture. He's also an archaeologist and Associate Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a published painter.
Out of town
The earliest cities
Related programme
We see the historic environment every day, as we walk out of our front door into a street, past a church and stroll by - or into - a pub. We might claim to be continually experiencing the historic environment. We interact with it. But we might not really understand it without some tools to reveal the distinct layers of the past.
A good start is to look carefully at the names of streets of your town - and the name of the town itself. There is music in names like ‘Oakham’ or ‘Breedon Hill’. The first example is biographical, an Anglo-Saxon record of an overlord, as it means ‘Occa’s fort’. Breedon Hill is an emphatic endorsement of a natural landscape feature, hidden in three languages. The name tells us about the hill which our ancient British ancestors generically called a ‘Bree’; evidently, it was later valued by the Anglo-Saxons, whose name for hill was ‘dun;’ and in the middle ages was added ‘hill’: so, ‘Hill-hill-hill’.
Names like this usually embody a simple honesty, but as records they may not account for changes in circumstance, often present a single viewpoint, and there is a danger that mutated names may be misinterpreted. But some excellent books are available to shed light on street names we take for granted, and are particularly useful in explaining how names change over the years to become abstractions of the original.
Individual streets can present evidence for historic industries at the entrance to towns and cities, where obnoxious-smelling (like tanneries), polluting (like blacksmiths’ forges or potteries) or storage-hungry industries like fulling were situated. York and Lincoln have streets called Pottergate, for example. Some industries required open spaces: brickmakers needed to dig clay and earth, stack bricks to dry and fire them in kilns, whilst dyers stretched their coloured cloths over drying frames called ‘tenters’, arrayed in the fresh air. These occupations, like weavers, millers and bakers, might still be recorded in place-names.
The food industry was always important. Smithfield in London, famous for its meat-market, was once ‘Smooth field’, a rustic area where the cattle reared on meadows stretching north to Camden were gathered and slaughtered for the tables of Londoners: the present -day Victorian - built meat market perpetuates the usage of this site over a couple of thousand years. Commercial life gave us names like ‘Saturday Market’ for a square in King’s Lynn, to differentiate from the nearby ‘Tuesday Market’, telling us not just what happened but when it happened.
Other names refer to means of navigation. River transport was extremely important: London seems to have gained 15% extra area by reclaiming riverside land during the middle ages. Stamford in Lincolnshire is built on Jurassic limestone, rising from a shallow section of the River Welland where the stony river bed offers a ford: ‘Stone Ford’.
next > Page 1 of 2
