Eastgate Street



Eastgate Street, along with Northgate Street, Bridge Street and Watergate Street, is one of the four original streets built inside Roman Chester. All four streets meet at the High Cross, and each contains part of The Rows. Hemingway writes of it that it:


 * "..is tolerably wide and forms a direct line from the Cross to the Eastgate being somewhat more than 200 yards in length. Some good buildings have lately been erected here but still it may be said that the venerable appearance of many others present to the eye as it were a model of every thing antique in the universe where in some places new built houses arc intermixed with the old ones the appearance is motley and grotesque. To see a modern mansion just finished standing between two gothic structures the youngest probably not less than two hundred years old, gives the beholder an idea if the allusion may be allowed of the picture of an exquisite of the present day placed between the portraitures of a brace of beaux of the last century or if the hyperbole be too strong of a splendid family mansion flanked by a couple of mud-wall cowhouses."

The Boot Inn
The Boot is, at and above Row level, a more or less intact timber-framed building dated 1623, with a rebuilt facade from the 19thC. The over-row parlour (which provides a seating area) is clad almost completely in 17thC wainscot. The pub has occupied the building since at least 1750, although the Row level "shop" has also been a barbers so that the pub was accessed by walking down a corridor.

One curio behind the bar is a stone shot which was found in one of the oak beams during a 1986 restoration. This could be from the Civil War, or it may be a home-made poachers bullet.

Purported to have once been a notorious brothel, unexplained female moans and laughter are said to be occasionally heard and supposedly are of supernatural origin.


 * The Boot on Wikipedia;

Number 17a
Number 17a