The rise, fall, rise and rise again of Stamford

When you visit a town with a large number of old buildings, there are typically two questions you ask yourself about it:

1.      What made it grow? Where did the money come from to build these no doubt expensive constructions?

2.      Why did the town decline, or at least, why hasn’t there been more recent money around to knock down all the old buildings that can still be seen (which is what happens in most towns)?

Most towns will have experienced one or the other; some have been through both. When you visit a town (as opposed to a village) there is usually some reason for its growth.  The reason we go to visit some towns for their architecture is often because both the first and the second factors took place: Bruges is the classic example; a town that became fabulously wealthy because of the cloth trade, and then declined as Antwerp became more dominant. This doesn’t of course answer all the questions you might have about a town, but it’s a good start.

Today was a visit to Stamford, and in preparation I tried to answer the above two questions. Stamford is a very attractive town, with over 300 listed buildings. When were they built? As far as can be seen from the built environment today, they were built in two periods. During the medieval period, Stamford had several parish churches, and some at least of them were grand (one account states there were 14 parish churches in Stamford in 1400). Clearly the town was wealthy during this period. But much of what you can see today dates from the 17th and 18th centuries.  So why did the town decline, and why the number of buildings dating from a period after its presumed decline?

The explanation in the guidebooks for the decline is usually that the wool trade moved to East Anglia (in Pevsner it is baldly stated as “in the 15th-century, when the wool and cloth trade deserted Stamford for East Anglia”, without stating why). A possible reason for this is that the river Welland, on which Stamford was originally founded, and which was navigable up to Stamford, enabling trade across the North Sea, became silted up. So that explains the decline of the wool trade; but why did Stamford grow again? Reasons for this seem to be less clear. Possible explanations are:

-         The town’s situation on the Great North Road as a coaching inn location

-         The river Welland was made navigable again for a time (I haven’t found any authority for this statement)

The first of these sounds plausible. There are indeed several inns on the main N-S road through the town. This would also explain the town’s decline, since when the railways arrived Stamford showed little enthusiasm for having a station, which meant that the main N-S railway was routed through nearby Peterborough. But there are plenty of examples of coaching towns that grew moderately during the 18th century, but which are nowhere near as grand as Stamford – Benson in Oxfordshire is an example. In fact, Pevsner states the population of the town was just 4,000 in 1801, and only 9,000 in 1851 – this is not very spectacular growth. So I am at a loss to understand where these 300 listed buildings originated. As you can see from the photo at the top of this post, some church monuments are powerful indicators of wealth. Whoever paid for it (and it is ridiculously out of scale compared to the chapel in which it is placed) was demonstrating their money. 

As for the way the present-day authorities deal with this marvellous town, I was disappointed. Not one of the old churches seems to have been adapted for a civic purpose. One church, St Michael’s, has been converted to shops – but only using the ground floor space. The main part of the church remains disused. That seems a great waste. Browne’s Hospital, “one of the best medieval hospitals in England”, according to Pevsner, cannot be visited, although it has a chapel and dormitory that I would guess could be visited without disturbing the elderly residents who live in separate accommodation.

All in all, Stamford is an impressive town - and all the more impressive for a town that lost its biggest industry before around 1500.