Industrial Revolution

Traditional Industry in Chester
Early evidence for "industry" in Chester points to leather, lead and linen as significant commodities traded here. Remains from Roman Chester include lead ingots, one being inscribed IMP•VESP•AVGV•T•IMP•III (the word DECEANGI appears on the side, pointing to a source in North Wales) which means it can be dated to AD74.

During the 13th and 14th century, Chester was the largest and busiest port in the north-west, trading with ports throughout the British Isles and Europe.



In medieval Chester the main industry was leather. There were skinners, tanners, glovers, shoemakers and saddlers in profusion. Local landmarks include "Shoemakers Row" and the "Gloverstone". As well as leather from dairy farming pelts and skins were imported on a huge scale. Both tanned and raw hides were sent from Ireland to Chester, together with tallow used in waterproofing, but skins were considerably more numerous. In 1525-6, for example, Chester received some 2,200 hides, over 13,000 lambskins, 10,200 sheepskins, 2,300 badger pelts, 1,100 calfskins, 640 marten and otter skins, 300 fox skins, 90 goatskins, and 50 hart skins. Alum and oil, used by Glovers and Tawyers to prepare light leathers, also came from Ireland. Prices for skins in the luxury market rose fast between 1500 and 1550, marten tripling in price and otter quadrupling, and Irish skins were sold in London after preparation in Chester. In 1536 Chester was brought into the national customs system for leather and in 1537-8 customs duties were paid on 10,681 tanned hides in five Spanish and five Chester ships. Figures for later years ranged from 700 to 1,600 hides, with Spanish merchants exporting the larger share. The privileges of the various trades and their asssociated guilds were jealously guarded (see: "Charters") - in 1433, the Mayor and Sheriffs of Chester were ordered to find and punish all ‘foreigners’ who used the trade of skinner and shoemaker within the liberties of Chester.

In the 18th century, Chester traded in raw hide with the Americas and even sent slave ships to Africa. Grain and wine were also major imports. Until the start of the 14th Century, the ancient city walls provided adequate defence to the port (the navigable River used to extend as far as Watergate). Silting of the River Dee had become a serious problem, leading to a loss of maritime trade to rival ports such as Liverpool. In response, the River Dee Company was formed and the Old Port area was developed as a new port for the City. A cut was formed which allowed easier navigation and led to the construction of Crane Wharf. Improvements to the river Weaver after 1730 served to channel trade from central Cheshire away from Chester to the Mersey, and the Trent and Mersey Canal Act of 1766 threatened to strengthen still further the dominance of Liverpool over the Dee. By the late 18th Century the port further waned, and focus shifted to linking it with the canal network, resulting in the construction of the Dee basin and Tower Wharf. Chester Canal became known as "England's first unsuccessful canal", after its failure to bring heavy industry to Chester.

2009 saw the closure of "Shuttleworths" in Bridge Street.

Sources and Links

 * Shuttleworths, as it was.

Broader Contect
The "Industrial Revolution" was the emergence of improved manufacturing processes during the period from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. Developments included, among others:
 * the canal network: (see: Canal and Boatyard);
 * hand production methods being replaced by the increased use of machines, including the development of machine tools. Mechanised cotton spinning powered by steam or water increased the output of a worker by a factor of about 1000. The power loom increased the output of a worker by a factor of over 40. The cotton gin increased productivity of removing seed from cotton by a factor of 50. Gains in productivity also occurred in spinning and weaving of the Chester "staples" wool and linen, but they were not as great as in cotton.
 * new chemical manufacturing and iron production processes;
 * improved efficiency of water power;
 * the increasing use of steam power: following it's introduction the efficiency of steam engines increased so that they used between one-fifth and one-tenth as much fuel. Steam allowed the development and expansion of railways (see: Chester Station), leading to a Railway "Mania" humourously recollected in the "Hunting of the Snark" (..They threatened its life with a railway share..);
 * the change from wood and other (mostly renewable) bio-fuels to coal: for a given amount of heat, coal required much less labour to mine than cutting wood, and coal was more abundant than wood.

In Chester
A leadworks was established by the canal in 1799; its shot tower, which was used for making lead shot for the Napoleonic Wars, is the oldest remaining shot tower in the UK.

A glance at the 1872 OS Map shows that Chester has barely outgrown its City Walls.

In Chester the number of male manufacturing workers remained almost static between 1871 and 1911, but there was a great change in the work they did. The proportion employed in the traditional and handicraft sector dropped from 61% to 43% with the most dramatic fall in shoemaking. The footwear trade became more concentrated in specialist towns like Stafford, Northampton, and Leicester, and mechanized factory production progressively eliminated hand-work.

Decline
The prosperity of Chester's shops and services depended to a large extent on custom from the City itself. Demand from outside enabled it to support a larger range than its own population would have justified, but perhaps 60-65% of Chester's trade came from residents of the city and its suburbs. Conflicting economic factors applied:
 * Chester's restricted manufacturing base weakened the local service economy, since the city was deficient in both an industrial middle class and a skilled working class, two groups with significant purchasing power in the late Victorian economy.
 * Improved railway connexions allowed the wealthy from Liverpool, Manchester, and other towns to choose the city as an elegant place of residence: in 1899 it was asserted that only four of 75 occupiers in Hoole Road derived their living from Chester. Chester also attracted a class living off inherited wealth and investment income, who perhaps formed 5% of the population by the Edwardian period.

Browns' monopoly had been broken in the late 19thC. by the growth of three other stores which exploited the increased spending power of the middle classes (and to a lesser extent working people):
 * Richard Jones's drapery business was founded in Watergate Street in the 1850s, and expanded into larger premises in Bridge Street in the 1860s. It diversified into furnishings and grew rapidly from the 1890s, and in 1900 opened a new clothing shop in Eastgate Street, by which time it was second only to Browns in importance.
 * The Chester Co-operative Society opened a grocery in Black Diamond Street in 1884, moved into the city centre in the 1890s, and by 1905 the Foregate Street premises had developed into a large department store.
 * Burrells was also a newcomer: Thomas Gaze Burrell, a Norfolk man working in London, was advised in 1877 that Chester was growing in importance as a shopping centre and would be an ideal place to start a business. He bought an existing haberdashery shop at no. 32 Foregate Street and renamed it the 'Little Wonder'. By 1890 he had opened men's, women's, and children's clothing shops and in 1899 expanded into furnishings.

The grocery trade changed greatly between 1890 and 1914. New shops were dispersed in the suburbs and the number of city-centre grocers fell. The chain stores of Liptons, Home & Colonial, Maypole, and Pegrams established branches in Chester, and their branded, packaged goods started to supplant the shop-blended and shoppacked provisions typical of the older and often more exclusive retailers. By 1910 there were c. 20 chain stores in the city, including Boots, Marks & Spencer, and Hepworths, but Chester remained a shopping centre dominated by local businesses often biased towards a wealthy and socially select clientele.

An upswing in the service economy performance after the 1890's led to even more of the City Center being rebuilt in the "Mock Tudor" style. Eastgate Street remained the heart of commerce, but developments of the ends of Bridge Street, Northgate Street and to some extent Watergate Street radiating from the High Cross as desirable locations pushed out the smaller shops. The story was different in lower Bridge Street and much of Watergate Street where buildings became subdivided and in some cases ruinous.



Behind the "Mock Tudor" facades of The Rows living conditions in the "Courts" remained appalling. While this "core of rottenness" became a subject of debate and these "foul and filthy dens" were seen as "the resorts of thieves, prostitutes and drunkards" (Chester Chronicle, 29th Nov 1879). Commercial pressures were to lead to the clearance of many of these inner city slums.

Relative growth of the "Service Economy"
The general rise in the standard of living which occurred during the later C.19th century led to relative growth in Chester's shops and services. That is, the proportion of people working in the service sector grew, but there was little underlying growth. Employment in shops, services, and transport almost doubled from 26 per cent of the working population in 1861 to 42 per cent in 1911, when nationally only 35 per cent of the labour force worked in service employments. While Chester had a relatively large service sector by the early 1870s, it did not grow particularly quickly before 1914, and less rapidly than in the country as a whole, growing by 58% between 1871 and 1911 compared with a national growth rate of 68%. The generally depressed period between 1873 and the 1890s seems to have hit Chester's most prestigious shop, Brown, Holmes & Co., where sales in real terms stagnated after 1870, and there were some particularly bad years, notably 1871-2 and between 1879 and 1884.

The "Long Depression" led (in 1879) to a reduction of wages in the Chester engineering trade, and the cheese market of 1879 was described as 'the deadest for 30 years'. Chester's private banks were badly affected by the national banking crisis of 1878/9, itself a reflection of the depression. Dixon & Co. was forced into amalgamation with Parr's Bank, and although the "Chester Old Bank", Williams & Co., survived, it remained weak during the 1880s. In the run on the bank by depositors of the "North and South Wales Bank" (with an office in Eastgate Street) a then staggering one million (a fifth of the total deposits) was withdrawn in a few days following the spectacular collapse of the City of Glasgow Bank in 1878. Chester's banking sector would see nothing so bad until the global banking crisis of the early C.21st.