The arrangements and measurements of streets tell many stories. Winchester offers a particularly long and complex pattern of urban development. At the west end of the city can be seen a series of parallel streets of Victorian terraced houses that rise as if each street were set on a giant step. But this was no engineering work of Brunel or his contemporaries; the streets were built on the side of a great Iron-age hill fort, once protected by rows of ditches and banks. The Romans overthrew this fort to create their new town of Venta Belgarum: a playing-card shaped plan surrounded by a wall, with a central crossroads at the junction of a ‘cardo’ (north-south street) and ‘decumanus’ (west-east street). This crossroads was the public focus of the city and so featured the customary public buildings of forum and temple in an open square.

This arrangement was typical of Roman towns across their empire, and at Winchester they even diverted the river into a canal to achieve regularity. Winchester’s seventh-century Anglo-Saxon cathedral was situated near the ancient forum, and the city was renamed with the Anglo-Saxon suffix ‘caster’, meaning a fortified settlement. The Anglo-Saxon streets were eventually laid out on an irregular grid, with a distinguishing characteristic: all the plots, running perpendicular to the main street, had a 17 feet width upon which were built timber and thatch houses.

Today, if you walk along Winchester High Street, you can see that the widths of the shop frontages have been perpetuated ever since: sometimes, neighbouring properties were purchased and a 2 feet x 17 feet = 34 feet frontage will be the result. But in any case, you’ll be looking at mobile phones and trainers through modern shop windows that silently conform to a scheme fixed a thousand years ago.

Not all towns have a Roman origin, of course. Castles were often imposed on sites to take advantage of defensible locations such as the bend of the River Wear upon which Durham cathedral and castle were built to guard St Cuthbert’s body, taken from the reach of Vikings from Lindisfarne, via Chester-le-Street. Caernarvon (a mile distant from Roman Segontium), built from 1282, is an excellent example of a medieval bastide town with a curtain wall, its purpose being to defend the English command in a newly-conquered Wales (and even to accommodate Edward I and Queen Eleanor of Castile, should they have stayed in their palatial Eagle Tower).

The architect was James of St-George, a Savoyard who employed the defensive technology used in crusader castles as well as those of his native frontier territory of the Alps. The striped masonry and polygonal turrets he supervised on the west side of the castle are unique in Wales but uncannily reminiscent of the Roman city walls of Constantinople that Edward and Eleanor saw whilst on crusade a thousand miles away.

Our cities, towns and villages are physical documents of life in the past. Their names, street patterns and buildings may describe geography, origins, industries, trade, or personal choices. Exactly how much they reveal is up to you.

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Content last updated: 29/11/2005

About our expert

Jonathan Foyle is a Historian of Architecture, Art and Culture. He's also an archaeologist and Associate Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a published painter.

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