Cheshire: The historic buildings of Northwich

Plaques like this can be found in various strategic places around the town of Northwich, in Cheshire. Though unfortunately now out of date, they were made to last and are very well done, with a reasonably, though not entirely accurate map of the town centre and depictions of the very impressive historic buildings to be found around the town.

I decided to find all the buildings, to take my own photos of them and find out more about each one. Here’s the result.

1. Bridge House

During my first photo walk I couldn’t find Bridge House, probably because the map shows it sitting right on the corner of London Road and Chester Way when it is, in fact, further along London Road. Though not in recent years, the building has actually been moved twice in its lifetime. Constructed in 1850, it was originally a public house, and was itself built to replace an earlier brick building that was demolished due to subsidence – the timber-framing makes it easier to move. 

In time, the replacement building was also in danger of subsiding into the River Dane so, in 1913, the 55-ton building was rolled along the road to its present location. In 1998, after standing empty for 7 years, Bridge House was renovated and converted into 5 flats, at a cost of £200,000. At the same time, it was moved again, this time upwards, onto a platform that would protect it from those pesky 100-year floods. Sadly, I have no information about those handsome people adorning its frontage.

2. Parr’s Bank

This is another building with a moving history. According to the current occupant’s website ‘the whole building was lifted over 4 feet using the old fashioned lifting methods which was the standard way n the 19th century. These jacks, pumps and manifolds were supplied by the Brine Board and are now on display at the Salt Museum’. Apparently, this was the last building to be lifted in Northwich, in the 1920s, and local historian Daniel Clark has posted a wonderful photo on Twitter showing the process. 

Parr’s Bank was originally established in Warrington c.1788 and expanded into Northwich through its acquisition of Thomas Firth & Sons in 1865. This building once housed its local branch office. 

3. The Bull Ring

Since I first visited Birmingham in 1980 I’ve been fascinated with the idea of a ‘bull ring’ in the centre of towns and cities. It seems the name harks back to centuries past when bull-baiting was a popular sport. A bull would be attached to a metal ring, usually found in the ground in a central market area, and dogs would be set on the poor creature. As well as providing sport for onlookers, the purpose of the baiting was to improve the quality of the bull’s meat – the process was thought to soften or tenderise the meat – so baiting was often conducted by the town butcher.

In his book Life is Now! How to make it happen, John Eaton writes: ‘My maternal grandfather (Harry Houghton) was born in 1861 and he told me that when he was a boy he remembers on a number of occasions when a bull would be baited by two bulldogs in the Bull Ring in Northwich. The bulldogs always won.’ Thankfully times have changed and, nowadays, the Bull Ring is simply an intersection.

4. Town Bridge

Spanning the River Weaver and built by the Weaver Navigation Trustees in 1898-99, Town Bridge and Hayhurst Bridge, 600 metres downstream, were the first road swing bridges to be built in Britain and the first to be powered by electricity. The single steel spans of both bridges were constructed so as to pivot from the western bank when tall river traffic needs to pass along the river – very ingenious! I haven’t yet seen the bridges working.

5. 20-22 High Street

As one of Northwich’s plaques explains:

Timber-framed buildings were the Victorians response to the subsidence problems caused by wild brine pumping. Techniques were refined until the more sophisticated examples that survive today could be jacked back to a level position. Ranging from small sheds to larger elaborately decorated structures, these ‘Tudor-beathan’ style black and white buildings give Northwich its unique character.

One of many timber-framed buildings in Northwich’s High Street, this one is now occupied by Saffron Indian and Nepalese restaurant though it originally housed offices and a bank. As you can see from my photographs, the decorative detail on these old buildings is rather splendid. But who are those green-coated black-cloaked gents propping up the top of the building I wonder.

6. 21-23 High Street

Across the High Street from Saffron Restaurant is this even more wonderfully embellished construction. It has the heads of dragons and monsters adorning its jettied carved window heads, and four carved and painted figures on either side of the mullioned windows. The figures apparently represent the town cryer and the nightwatchman and the couple holding cups and plates, an innkeeper and his wife.

7. Moore and Brock’s Riverside Warehouse

I hunted and hunted for this building until I discovered that it no longer exists!

It was a grade-two-listed three-storey timber-framed building built in 1890 by Thomas Moore, a local slate merchant who had set up The Northwich Carrying Company in 1883. George Brock joined the business as a director in 1906 and the two operated a successful freight company, using the warehouse by the River Weaver as a base to transport salt and other chemicals between Northwich and Liverpool.

Though the company continued operations following the deaths of its directors, it was eventually wound up in 1932 by which time river transportation was no longer economically viable. The warehouse building was unoccupied for a long period and then suffered severe damage in an arson attack so was demolished in November 2008.

8. RAOB Silver Jubilee Club

This 4807-square-foot building in Witton Street was designed in 1911 by Mr J. Cawley (who designed many of Northwich’s ornate subsidence-liftable buildings, including number 5 above). In October 1913 it became the Constitutional Club and headquarters of the Conservative and Unionist Association, and was later owned by the RAOB Silver Jubilee Club, hence its name.

As the photos show, the building has lovely ornately leaded windows and beautifully carved mythical creatures on the dormer brackets. No wonder it’s another of Northwich’s grade-two-listed buildings.

9. Brunner Library

In 1909, this stunning building was donated to the town by Sir John Brunner, the local MP for the periods 1885-86 and 1887-1910. Designed by the architect A. E. Powles and built by Hartford builder W. Wood, it adjoined the original salt museum and was another building to be constructed with an oak frame to resist subsidence and to allow lifting (the earlier 1885 library, also donated by Brunner, had slipped away!).

10. Former Head Post Office

Designed by H.M. Office of Works in 1914 as a purpose-built Post Office to serve Northwich and surrounding districts, this is the town’s largest liftable building. It was converted to a pub in the late 1990s, appropriately enough named The Penny Black, the name of the world’s first self-adhesive postage stamp. 

 In his book The Buildings of England, architectural historian N. Pevsner describes it as a ‘super, black and white’. Very profound, Mr Pevsner! The listed buildings website has rather more detail: 

Post Office, 1911, architect not known. Subsidence-liftable small-framed timber structure with recessed plaster panels; tiled roof. 3 storeys plus attic; 5 windows. Symmetrical, Elizabethan, lavishly ornamented. 4-storey porch has double doors in Tudor archway with balustraded leaded overlight; paired pilasters carry, on shaped brackets, bressumer inscribed POST OFFICE in gilt Gothic lettering; ornate 2-storey oriel window; deeply jettied gable with mullioned and transomed casement. Left of doorway a mullioned and transomed casement and a Tudor-arched vehicular entrance to sorting office at rear; 2 mullioned and transomed windows right of doorway; 2 to each upper storey to each side of porch; 4 gabled attic dormers. Chevron and quatrefoil braces and ornate timber decoration to panels; coved plaster eaves; casements to front leaded. Plain small-framed end gables. Sorting office of plain framing with grey slate roof.

11. British Waterways Offices

When it was built in 1826, this building housed the Weaver Navigation Office. It then became home to the local British Waterways offices but that entity ceased to exist in England and Wales in 2012, replaced by the Canal and River Trust. It’s a two-storey brown brick building, with hipped grey-slate roofs, and boasts a rather grand entranceway, flanked by columns of Tuscan marble. The 1830 clock tower is also very impressive.

12. Edwardian Pumping Station

This is the Dock Road Edwardian Pumping Station and is certainly the most unusual building on this tour of Northwich’s historic buildings. It’s hard to imagine such a picturesque structure was built to pump sewage but indeed it was, in 1913, and a good thing too – before it was built, Northwich’s untreated sewage was discharged directly into the river.

I haven’t yet seen inside as the building is only open to the public on Sundays and Bank Holidays from Easter to the end of September (and to groups at other times by arrangement) but the exterior signboard notes that ‘the original Hayward Tyler sewage pumps and Crossley gas-fired engines have been fully restored and are demonstrated regularly’. I’m certainly keen to check out this unique example of environmental engineering from over a hundred years ago so I’ll be there at Easter for the grand tour.

13. Weaver Hall Museum

Northwich’s museum inhabits the former Union Workhouse, one of those structures designed to house the destitute, those locals who had insufficient money or income to cover their daily living expenses. Designed by George Latham and completed in 1839, it served 61 parishes in the mid-Cheshire area and could house up to 300 inmates.

When workhouses were abolished in 1930, the building was renamed Weaver Hall but its function remained practically the same as it continued to house the infirm, the elderly and the destitute. That form of community support ceased in 1964 and the men’s and women’s ward were subsequently demolished. The remaining structure opened as a museum in 1981.

England: Northwich, Cheshire

The weather was sunny once again – though not renowned for its balmy weather, Blighty was very kind to me during this trip – and Sarah needed to collect some shoes from the repairman in her closest large town, Northwich, so we decided to walk there and back, about an hour each way. 

It was a pleasant stroll and good exercise if rather hot. The first part of our walk was on a footpath along the roadside then we veered off onto trails through the Northwich Community Woodlands, where there are ‘flashes’ – a local word for lake, or, more accurately, areas of land that are filled with water in the winter and spring but mostly dry out over the summer months. These are havens for water birds and, though this was a quiet time for the birds, we saw, at a distance, black-headed gulls, white swan, lapwings and more. It must be a twitcher’s delight in the wetter seasons.

My lesson in the local vernacular continued as Sarah explained that ‘wich’ on the end of a town’s name refers to salt production. There is salt under the surface here – the locals hereabouts have been drying brine to produce salt since Roman times. Rock salt has also been mined in the surrounding area, though this has left large caverns underground which have, in turn, caused problems with subsidence. As part of a major redevelopment of Northwich, the mines have now been stabilised by removing millions of litres of brine and replacing it with a mixture of pulverised fuel ash, salt and cement.

Hopefully, the redevelopment will not overshadow Northwich’s pretty little shopping area, which contains many examples of typical black-and-white half-timbered Cheshire houses, some of which are genuinely old, others made to replicate the old architectural style. According to Professor Wiki, ‘the black-and-white revival was an architectural movement from the middle of the 19th century which reused the vernacular elements of the past, using timber framing’. The Victorians seemed to like the idea of painting the wooden framing black and the panels in between white, as part of their revival of Tudor architecture.

Left, the nightwatchman, with the innkeeper and his wife in the centre, and the towncryer at right

It certainly makes for picturesque images and my photo of the day was of one of these buildings (above), now a shop, that has dragon and monster heads adorning the jettied, carved window heads, and four figures (carved and painted) on either side of the mullioned windows. The figures apparently represent the town cryer and the nightwatchman, and the couple holding cups and plates, the innkeeper and his wife. Other buildings had similar types of decoration and my neck was soon stiff from craning upwards to look at them all.

Northwich also has two very unusual swing bridges, which usually carry road and pedestrian traffic but still have the ability to swing from one end to the side of the river to allow taller river traffic to pass. Hayhurst Bridge, built in 1898, and Town Bridge (pictured here), built a year later, are believed to be the first electrically powered swing bridges in Britain. Two bridges were built so that, when a ship was passing through town, road traffic would always be able to pass over one of them.

The waterway pictured above is the River Weaver (and the River Dane also runs through Northwich) but there are also canals aplenty in this part of the country – used in the past to transport the salt and now for pleasure, with many narrowboats and broader canal boats to be seen. There is something romantic about these boats – imagine living on one and exploring England that way!

My fascination with England’s pub signs began on this day in Northwich, when I first saw the sign for The Swinging Witch. From what I could discover, the name is recent and simply an invention – there is no historical story about the hanging of a local witch to go with it, though local resident Phil Thompson was kind enough to send me information about the case of the supposed demonic possession of a young Northwich lad in 1602. The signs of his ‘possession’ were: ‘the wagging of the head without intermission, supernatural strength, senselessness during his fits, utterance of wonderful speech’ – sounds like the poor lad simply suffered from something like epilepsy.

The Iron Bridge does not have such a colourful story attached – as the sign indicates, it is situated beneath an iron railway bridge – though there is a mystery hanging over it. It was formerly called The Thatched Tavern, though the roof is not thatched and, as the building actually consists of three terraced houses knocked together, it may always have been tiled. Perhaps the name recalls a previous building on the same site. (There will be future blogs on pub signs!)

Northwich, then, was an interesting town to explore. We wandered from one end of town to the other, Sarah got her shoes, and we enjoyed lunch and some people-watching sitting outside a local bakery. Afterwards, we walked back the same way we had come, and it was even hotter! I was to discover the delights of a refreshingly cool jug of Pimm's later that afternoon.