St John Street

Early History


In Roman Chester, St John Street would have been roughly the route from the Eastgate to the Amphitheatre. Roughly because it is known that the line of the Roman and modern walls differ somewhat along this section. During excavations on the site of the Library in 1988/9, the stump of the fortress wall was found to be several metres in advance of the current line of the walls. The remains of the facing blocks of the Roman wall were very badly damaged, indicating that there had been a catastrophic collapse of the wall rather than a gradual erosion. There is some evidence that this was not the first time this section of the wall had collapsed as the wall seems to have been substantially rebuilt in the early fourth century. The current line of the City Walls behind St John Street probably follows that of Æthelflæd's reconstruction in the early 10th century during the course of Æthelflæd's military campaigns designed to secure the northern frontier of Mercia against the Vikings. It was also not to be the last time that this section of the walls needed repair: on the third of April 2008, a 30-metre section of the walkway hereabouts, behind the Chester Grosvenor hotel and the Mall shopping centre, was closed after part of the City Walls collapsed at 5.30pm.

Hemingway (1831) records under "the names of all the streets and lanes within the city of Chester and suburbs of the same as they were named in the days of King Edw the 3rd and afore by the Recorder thereof in writing in a table and copied herein by the commandment of the worshipful Richard Dutton mayor of the said city":


 * "ST JOHN'S STREET is Saint John's lane that goeth out of this street towards the church and college and from it at the Cornhill of the mansion place of the petite Chanon there is a lane after the wall of the church yard and it is named Vicar's lane and it putteth upon Barker's lane and Love lane and at the end of this street there goeth a way down to the water of Dee and this said way is named the Souter's loode."

Edward III ruled from 13 November 1312 – 21 June 1377 and a "Chanon" is a canon, i.e. a member of the clergy serving in a cathedral or collegiate church. It is possible at this time, as suggested by Hanshall (1816) that the street may have been known as "Ironmongers Row" from the number of smiths hereabouts.

St John's Lane, as it was, is shown as fully built-up on the Braun and Hogenberg map of Chester which dates from 1581. However, all of the early buildings may have been demolished in the Civil War - while Cromwell's troops prepared to besiege Chester in the early 1640s the royalist defenders destroyed almost every building where attackers could shelter from view outside the City Walls. Everything medieval outside the walls except the Old Dee Bridge, St Johns church and the Hermitage was destroyed.



Hemingway also describes the street as being rather run-down by the early 19thC but then "improved":


 * John street a clean neat and commodious street in which there are many residences and amongst others those of the Hon Edwd Massy, Mrs Sloughter, Mr James Dixon and Mrs Freeman. On the west side of this street there is also a very handsome chapel with a circular front occupied by the Wesleyan Methodists and built in the year 1811. The hand of improvement is particularly observable in this street which till about fifteen years ago was dark narrow and incommodious. At the bottom of the street are the grounds and mansion of Sir John Salusbury on the right a road leading to Newgate and Pepper streets and on the left Little St John street in which is the elegant residence of George Brooke Esq.

James Dixon, husband of Mary Anne (the benefactress of the Dixon’s Almshouses at Christleton), was the youngest of the three sons of Thomas Dixon (1755-1811), a Chester timber merchant who lived at Littleton Hall, Littleton. James followed his father into the timber trade, owned property in Christleton and Chester and was also involved in shipbuilding in the city. Other past residents of St John Street have included Boden the builder and Lunt, foundry owner and developer for Chester in the early 19th Century.

Marlborough Arms
A Victorian Vernacular Revival pub with a mostly original shop front. The keen-eyed will note the spelling of "Marlbororough" - the odd pub name spelling is due to a signwriter's error that stuck. The story goes that the signwriter stopped work on a hot day for a few pints and forgot where he was up to, another version is that the signwriter saw one of the several ghosts said to haunt the building and being "spooked" made his error. A yet futher version is that the error was made by the man labelling the pub's first house ale: he meant to write "Marlborough Ale" and he was somehow distracted (one version involves a ghost again). Early photographs of the pub show the correct spelling on the sign.

No 9
This small town-house was built around 1760 and is possibly the oldest surviving building on St John Street, although the larger town house futher down the street may be a little older.



The Library
This building has now gone, but it had an interesting history while it lasted.

Subscribers to an intended circulating library obtained permission to use a room in the Exchange in 1773, but it is not certain that the venture was ever launched. The first public library to be set up in Chester was the City Library in Whitefriars in 1773. It had very few novels having mainly erudite tomes on history, geography, law and philosophy. It was situated first in the entrance to Bolland’s Court and then it moved to a room in Fletcher’s buildings, Bridge Street (later used as the offices for the Chester Chronicle).

By the early 19th century Chester boasted several small libraries, the most important of which was the City or Public library, owned by 120 proprietors, which began in the premises in Whitefriars and eventually moved to rooms over the Commercial News Room in St. Peter's churchyard in 1815. To use the Public Library there was an entrance fee of 10/6d and then an annual subscription of one guinea (the average wage at the time for a general labourer was £44).

The Council considered building a library and museum in Northgate Street on land adjacent to the Abbey Gateway, next to the proposed new King’s School. However, at the suggestion of E. G. Salisbury, a former M.P. for Chester, it decided to buy a St John's Street building (on the site of the club "Cruise") from the Mechanics' Institute which had run into difficulties. £1,300 secured the building, books and other contents and the Mechanics' Institution was taken over by the city council in 1875 and converted into a free library under the Free Libraries Act of 1855. Its opening was delayed by conveyancing problems and the need for repairs.

The Chester Free Public Library opened its doors on 1st January 1877, twenty seven years after the Act which permitted the establishment of a free service. 36,000 books were issued in 1878, but the following year the Chronicle was already commenting on the ‘dingy and uncommodious rooms of the library building…and the unfitness of the building for the purposes of a library.” However it would be another 100 years before anything was done about it. The periodicals reading room and the lending library which opened in 1877, was largely restocked with novels, travel, history, and biography. A reference room on the top floor was opened in 1883. For the 1887 Jubilee T. M. Lockwood designed a new reading room in the garden behind the library and remodelled the front in a classical style with pilasters. The cost of the enlargement was met by William Brown, of Chester's leading department store, who chaired the council's library committee from 1880 to 1900. Brown had also been Mayor of Chester (1841), and President of the Mechanics Institution (1842 & 1843). A separate reading room for ladies was opened in 1890. In 1896 there was a short-lived and radical experiment to allow readers behind the librarian's counter to select their own books.

The library also stored books owned by local societies and professional associations, and let rooms to debating and learned societies for lectures and meetings. When the School of Science and Art was established in the Grosvenor Museum the library bought books required by students, chiefly on architecture, building, civil and electrical engineering, and chemistry. It also acted as a depository for course books needed for the Oxford University Extension scheme, launched in Chester in 1887.

In 1974 there was a Local Government re-organisation and Cheshire County Council gained control of the Library. From 1982 building work began on the new Chester library and in 1984 the new library opened in Northgate Street.

The Mechanic's Institute
The Mechanics’ Institution movement was one of the most remarkable movements in British educational history. During the period when they existed educational provision for the children of the working classes was practically non-existent. In 1833 only about 800,000 children were receiving some form of instruction and the majority of this was very elementary reading and writing. A further barrier to mass education was that non-conformists could not enter or take degrees at the English universities that existed at the time i.e. Cambridge and Oxford. Even at Oxbridge science was a very minor subject. The Mechanics' Institute movement attempted to provide technical education that was otherwise unavailable. France, Germany and Prussia had already established technical universities in the early 1800s whilst little happened in England until the turn of the 20th century and then only to a limited extent. During the 1830's movements such as the Chartists and the Co-operative movement emerged - in 1839 the state of the country was so unsettled and there was much talk of possible riots by the Chartists - and possibly even an attack on Chester Castle. The Castle was next to Chester Gaol, where many Chartists were held.

After 1848 the educational opportunities for workers rapidly declined even further and the majority of the Institutes became increasingly libraries, reading clubs, providing occasional popular lectures and locations for literary pursuits frequented by the middle and upper classes.

The Chester Mechanics Institution was proposed around 1810 by the Chester book-seller and publisher John Broster to establish a library, reading room for masters, journeymen, apprentices and workers. Hughes (1858) says of it:




 * Moving rapidly down this street leaving behind us the Post Office and the entrance to the Blossoms Assembly Room we pause before a house on our right hand approached by a flight of steps and having a lofty stuccoed front This is the Mechanics Institution and is consecrated to the instruction and healthy amusement of that important class of society whose name it bears In addition to a Library comprising several thousand volumes this Institution enjoys the advantages of a News Room liberally supplied with the leading daily and weekly papers together with sundry classes for the special behoof and instruction of the members During the summer months also members have the right of free admission to the Water Tower Museum which we described at some length in our Walk round the Walls What a marvellous fact it is that with these benefits within their reach so few mechanics comparatively avail themselves of this their own Institution.



The Chester Mechanics' Institution was initially set up in 1835 in Goss Street. The books and fixtures of the General library were bought with money "advanced" by William Wardell. Wardell was Mayor of Chester in 1840 and a partner in Dixon and Wardell's Bank. He also favoured reform of the voting franchise and supported the "Chester Ragged School". He was also well connected to the literati, exchanging letters with Sara Coleridge in 1835. Sara was the daughter of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Other donations brought the stock to 1,500 volumes, mostly nonfiction, by the end of 1835. Evening classes were held for architectural, mechanical, and landscape drawing, music, foreign languages, elementary arithmetic, and literacy. Unfortuntely, by this time Chester had been larely bypassed by the Industrial Revolution and it was not to be the working classes who benefited from the Mechanics Institution.

Within a year of its foundation in 1835 the Chester Mechanics' Institution resolved to establish a museum of working models, natural history, and antiquities. Among the many exhibits was "the skull of a soldier killed during the Civil War, the deadly impress of two flattened bullets being still visible in the skull". Benefactors gave objects for display and the city council offered a lease of Bonewaldesthorne's Tower and the Watertower on the city walls at a nominal rent.

In 1845 the Institution moved to rented premises in St. John Street, which it bought in 1856, and in the following year it bought the stock of the City library. From the late 1850s its educational activities began to fade; members preferred to read for amusement, and the library therefore bought more popular books. Membership was never more than a few hundred, and the annual subscription of 10s. restricted it to the skilled working and lower middle classes - a point which Hughes seems to overlook. The Institution was dogged by financial difficulties and survived only through philanthropic donations. In 1867 the management passed to trustees when the Institution became financially unsustainable.

Welsh Presbyterian Church
Buildt in 1866 to a design by William James Audsley (1833-1907) and George Ashdown Audsley (1838-1925) then of Liverpool. Both were born in Scotland. In 1860 the brothers opened offices in Upper Stanhope Street, Liverpool, and set up a partnership under the name W&G Audsley. They both became important figures in Liverpool society, joining the Liverpool Scottish Volunteer Rifles and playing an active role in the Liverpool Art Club.

The Audsleys moved to New York City in 1892 (William had moved there in 1885). The brothers then worked on the Bowling Green office building on Broadway, credited as being an example of New York's earliest skyscrapers, built between 1895 and 1898, and at one time the offices of the White Star Line. Although G. Audsley achieved considerable reputation as an architect specializing in church design, he was also known as a publisher of books on ornament, extending the relatively new process of chromolithography in order to produce magnificently illustrated volumes. He also designed church organs.

The narthex of the Welsh Presbyterian Church has octagonal corner piers, two intermediate columns of polished granite, three pointed arches to the front with a central false gable, an arch to each side; two boarded doors on ornate wrought-iron hinges, quatrefoil parapet, two corbel heads and what Pevsner describes as "dragon" gargoyles (they are actually a barking dog and an eagle); a lancet to each side of narthex; stepped buttresses at corners. The is a large rose window with colonnette spokes in a recessed panel with colonnette on each jamb; a lancet near gable apex and a cruciform finial.



Wesleyan Chapel
Hughes says:


 * Beyond this lie the Schools and minister's house of the Wesleyan Methodists divided only by a path to the Walls from the Wesleyan Chapel itself. The principles of Wesleyanism found their way into Chester as early as 1750 the first congregation being held at a house in Love Lane. Fifteen years afterwards the Octagon Chapel in Foregate Street was erected for them and continued to be their place of worship until the completion of the present edifice in 1811.

If Hughes is to be believed then the "Schools and minister's house" must have occupied the imposing town house at number 6, which still exists. This mid 18thC. building was altered somewhat c1975, but is in dark red-brown Flemish bond brick with painted stone dressings on the plinth and Corinthian corner pilasters fluted to the front. The "path to the walls" is still there and an exploration of it will reveal some of the original stonework - just by an L-shaped ashlar stair of 14 and 20 steps leading up to the walls are three eroded 19thC gravestones with a frieze above inscribed "WESLEYAN CHAPEL". The non-conformists built a day school next to the manse in 1839 (since demolished)

The exterior of the present chapel largely dates from 1906 by P. H. and W. T. Lockwood. The earlier building on the same site was by Thomas Harrison and William Cole. The face to St John Street, 1906, is symmetrical in indeterminate style with projecting 2-storey corner pavilions, formerly with entrances, now display windows, in front of the gabled main front with large 9-light round-arched window with quasi-panel tracery. A plaque above the window is inscribed "erected 1811 : restored 1906". Originally the chapel was correctly oriented, entered from the west, facing the City Walls, and with an apsidal east end to St John Street. This apse was curved and the bricks used had to be specially made. Thomas Harrison prepared only a plan, fee 20 pounds. This was an insufficient basis for builders' estimates. William Cole II, whose son was to be Harrison's pupil, completed the working drawings and prepared specifications, fee 85 pounds. Cole evidently also acted as a contractor for masonry, carpentry and joinery, approximately half the cost of the building (£6865.19s.10d). The 1906 extensions and alterations included reorienting the church. The apse was demolished, the new entrance front to St John Street built and the chancel added, or reordered from the previous porch, to replace the original entrance.