“Old Lowestoft” – A Case for Heritage Status and Funding

The High Street area of the modern town is a fine, surviving example of late medieval urban planning, resulting from relocation of the community (between c. 1300-1350) from its original site less than a mile west-south-west of the present one, somewhere in the large municipal cemetery between Normanston Drive and Rotterdam Road. The reasons for the move resulted from a combination of factors. Firstly, there was the growing importance of fishing and maritime trade in the local economy (over and above agriculture), which meant being nearer to the shoreline for efficient operation, followed by rising sea levels at the time causing Lake Lothing (now the Inner Harbour) to periodically inundate low-lying land close to the settlement. At the same time, an increasing population level created the need for extra dwellings, which would have resulted in the loss of adjacent arable land – a factor compounded by the grant of market and fair to the lord of the manor in 1308, with no suitable nearby venues on which to hold such events.

            The area chosen for the relocated township was an exposed piece of cliff-top, covered with scrub, bracken and coarse grass, which was used mainly for the rough grazing of livestock (at a modest charge) belonging to the manor’s tenants. Once changed over to building-land, the area produced a much higher income for the lord – not only from the sale of the land, but from imposing an annual ground-rent on the individual house-plots and levying an entry-fine on the new occupier every time a dwelling changed hands. Access to the beach area below was provided by a series of surface-water drainage channels, known as scores (from Old Norse skora, meaning “to cut” or “to incise”), which were progressively managed into footways along the whole length of the cliff, with larger ones at either end and in the middle for vehicular passage. They remain in use to this day and are a distinctive topographical feature in their own right.

            Once the decision to relocate the township had been taken, the major task was to make the face of the cliff usable. A slope of up to sixty degrees, or more, consisting of soft glacial deposits, did not lend itself to easy management, so it was dug into a series of terraces from end to end – probably starting at the northern one and working southwards down the natural slope of the land. The exercise must have taken some years to complete and one can only wonder at the organisational skills and determination of the people involved as they carried out the work alongside the farming and fishing, by which they sustained themselves. Altogether, about 1,000 yards of cliff were terraced, with three steps present over most of the length, diminishing to two and then finally to one in the last 300 yards. The terraces would have had wooden retaining walls to begin with, gradually replaced with masonry as time went on. An archaeological dig to the rear of 80 High Street, during the year 2000, revealed an introduced layer of clay to act as a footing and the earliest pottery shards found dated to c. 1300 – thus giving an approximate date for when the work probably began. In 1350, a licence was granted for a chapel-of-ease located on the site of the present-day Town Hall, thus indicating that the new township was up and running.

            Lowestoft High Street observes a sinuous alignment (following the contours of the land), on a north-south axis, with a pronounced fall over its length of some fifty feet. A lesser sloping east-west also exists, resulting in some complexity of drainage. This was managed by a system of gulleyways, with water-supply itself being provided by a series of wells dug through the lighter topsoil and sand down to the impervious clay layer where precipitation collected. Even today, in spite of all the engineering and building which has taken place over the years, it is still possible to see the spring-line emerging in a number of places along the face of the cliff. This serves as a reminder that natural forces and processes have a way of asserting their presence, in the face of all that human beings may attempt by way of managing them!

            Large house-plots on either side of the High Street were set out for the wealthier members of the community, with those on the cliff-top itself using the terraces as backyards, storage-areas and, at the lower levels, for buildings used in the processing of fish and the housing of fishing-gear. Many of the dwellings had cellars below ground-level, two of which survive at Nos. 41-42 and 160, and are indicative of the high quality of construction. None of the first-phase medieval houses survive, but seventeen of their replacements (dating from the late fifteenth century through to the early-mid seventeenth) are still standing, either in toto or in part, with impressive timber-framing in evidence – especially in Nos. 27, 30, 31, 36, 43-44, 102-104 and 148-149. A great deal of subdivision of the house-plots has taken place over the centuries, but it is still possible to ascertain the original fourteenth century layout in terms of shape and size. The visible evidence of the wealth deriving from fishing and maritime trade, together with the community confidence it produced, is perhaps best summed up by comments regarding Lowestoft made by the third Duke of Norfolk in May 1545, as he was conducting a survey of East Coast defences: “The town is as pretty a town as I know any few on the sea coasts, and as thrifty and honest people in the same, and right well builded.”

            In contrast to the larger houses along the High Street, the lesser members of the community lived in much smaller dwellings in a tightly packed gridiron-area immediately to the west of the main thoroughfare, accessed by five cross-lanes. These are still in existence as Mariners Street, Compass Street, Crown Street East, Wesleyan Chapel Lane and Duke’s Head Street. Their westward extensions have been cut through by a late 1970s inner relief-road, Jubilee Way, with passage prevented by flanking walls, but even the new highway itself is merely an expanded version of an old north-south track (running parallel with the High Street) known as Back Lane. Thus, in spite of such drastic modification, the old part of Lowestoft retains its original medieval layout in terms of two individually defined areas of housing and the roadways which serviced them.

            At the original western edge of town, where the dwellings of the artisan and labouring classes merged gently into open countryside, was the smallest of the town’s six common grazing-areas,  Goose Green, part of which still exists today as St. Margaret’s Plain – some of it serving as a car park and children’s play-area. It was the only place where geese (notoriously messy) were allowed to feed – other than in people’s backyards – and fines were imposed for allowing the birds to frequent other areas. Part of the space also served to hold the town’s fairs, with the original grant of 1308 stipulating an annual event of eight days to commemorate the feast of St. Margaret, the town’s patron (20 July). A later re-grant of 1445 increased this to two seven-day fairs centring on 1 May (the feast of St. Philip and St. James) and 29 September (Michaelmas).

            Directly tied up with the right to stage fairs, was the privilege of holding a weekly market. There was insufficient space to allow this to be located in the middle of the High Street area, though a dedicated corn-trading exchange was present, being integrated with the chapel-of-ease (mentioned five paragraphs above) and always referred to as the Corn Cross. All other trading activity took place further to the south, to the west of a formerly canopied area generally referred to as The Triangle – itself once a small market in its own right, though of much more recent origins than the original one behind it. This older facility served both the town itself and most of the local parishes within about a five or six mile radius and perhaps even a little further removed. Something of its former function can still be ascertained through a substantial part of it remaining undeveloped because of its use as a car park.

            There is no doubt that, given sufficient funding and informed, sympathetic treatment, the High Street part of present-day Lowestoft could make a very interesting heritage area for both casual visitors and specialist historians alike. And the old town itself, in terms of its street-pattern and buildings would not be the only attraction. Much more could be made of the scores and cliff-face, in terms of restorative treatment and sensitive landscaping – not in the sense of trying to recreate their appearance of centuries ago, but simply by tidying them up and making the most of their visual amenity. In serving as the link between the domestic part of old Lowestoft and the beach area below, their historical importance speaks very largely for itself.

            The beach, of course – or, to give it its other name, The Denes – was of huge importance in the development and function of Lowestoft. Five hundred years ago, it was more than double the present width, being half a mile in extent seawards and still culminating in the British mainland’s most easterly promontory, Ness Point. Until the harbour was built in 1827-30, and further improved by Samuel Morton Peto during the 1840s and 50s, it served as a vast open-air wharf for the temporary storage of goods of all kinds, with trading vessels lying at anchor in the sheltered inshore reaches and with ferry-boats conveying cargo both inwards and outwards. Its other main use was to provide rough grazing for livestock and to serve as a drying-ground for fishing-nets and lines – the gear usually being spread out on the scrub vegetation present after curative treatment against the deteriorating effect of salt water. The wooden structures still standing in one small area of the North Denes (known as spars) are twentieth-century survivors of earlier nineteenth-century counterparts. A close inspection of them reveals that many are made of split railway sleepers (the uprights) and old telegraph poles (the horizontals).

            This is not to deny their worth! Fishing was the very essence of Lowestoft for centuries, with drift-netting for herring and mackerel and hand-lining for demersal species possibly being carried out from late Anglo-Saxon times. By the time that the town relocated itself, c. 1300-1350, the landing and curing of herrings was a well-established local industry, with service buildings and smokehouses situated along the foot of the cliff and up onto the bottom-most terrace. From the early 1400s until the middle of the eighteenth century, Lowestoft craft (along with other East coast vessels from Ipswich to Scarborough) went lining for cod off Faeroe and Iceland during the spring months – something hard to believe today, given that dangers and distances involved. The middle of the nineteenth century saw trawling arrive in the town, with yet another maritime-based boost to the local economy and increased house-building on the southern part of The Denes in order to accommodate the increasing population. The so-called “Beach Village” was demolished during the 1960s as part of town re-development in the post-war period and the space is now occupied by small industrial and business units. Yet, even in its absence, it remains an important part of Lowestoft’s history.

            Further potential in terms of heritage may be found west of the High Street core. Routes along the east-west cross-lanes reveal much of interest: an early 17th century tithe barn, an early 19th century Fisher family theatre and, perhaps most important of all, the site of the Lowestoft china factory (c. 1757-1800) – third longest lived of all the English soft-paste porcelain works, after Worcester and Derby. Nor should the town’s grandest and most important medieval building, St. Margaret’s Church, be overlooked. At 182 feet, this is the third longest church in Suffolk and a marvel of building in the Perpendicular style. Its sheer size and appearance leave one in no doubt as to the affluence of the Lowestoft merchants who gave their money to see it built. It lies about three-quarters a mile due west of the old part of town, approached along the road which bears its name – this itself having once been the central baulk of the old, manorial North Field, with the roads going off from it at right-angles, north and south, observing the alignment of the arable strips.

            So much history lying beneath the later changes which have taken place! So much that deserves to be better and more widely known.

David Butcher – 7 January 2017. 

Updated with minor changes – 9 August 2024.