Selected projects
4.19.17 Cheshire historic towns survey
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The Cheshire Historic Towns Extensive Urban Survey is being undertaken by Cheshire County Council and is the first such project in the north-west. The urban experience in this region is significantly different from that of most of the counties where surveys are already well advanced, which are concentrated in historically more prosperous areas such as Essex, Kent, Somerset, and Gloucestershire. Towns in Cheshire tend to be fewer, smaller, and often later in date, but it is important to study such areas in order to document their own particular urban history, and to counteract any impression that the urban experience of a county such as Kent will also apply to areas of the country that were economically less advantaged. Data for the study of Cheshire towns are less accessible than for many other counties. The Victoria County History has yet to examine any of the Cheshire towns (except for Chester) and there is no earlier survey of the archaeology of the Cheshire towns similar to those undertaken for many counties in the 1970s. The present survey is therefore the first comprehensive examination of Cheshire towns and much of the town analysis is pioneering work.
The study area comprises the modern county of Cheshire and the two new unitary authorities of Warrington and Halton. About 40 towns are being examined over a period of two and a half years. They include former Roman industrial settlements such as Wilderspool, near Warrington, small medieval market towns such as Malpas, and recent industrial centres such as Widnes. In addition Cheshire contains a number of virtually unique settlements, including the salt-making centres of Nantwich, Northwich, and Middlewich, the canal town of Ellesmere Port, and the railway town of Crewe. As elsewhere a particular feature of the work will be the analysis of the historic components of each town and their mapping on a computerised Geographic Information System. This allows easy identification of the location and extent of a particular town at different periods as well as comparison between towns.