Inheriting the Landscape - How Cities Grow

The way cities grow now is more or less the same as it was in the medieval period. A minority are deliberately founded - created at a stroke as 'new towns' - on the lines of Milton Keynes (1967), or Salisbury (1219). Most grow bit-by-bit, in instalments or increments, either a house at a time - or a row, or a street, or an estate - or a mixture of all of these.

Worcester, like most historic English cities, is a composite town that has achieved its present extent by the repeated addition of new growths over many different periods. Recent growth episodes are easily distinguished as they retain their original buildings: the difference between, say, an estate built in the 1960’s and another in the 1980’s is usually instantly apparent.

But even at the heart of the historic core, which has been built up for a millennium and where buildings have been replaced many times, original growth episodes may still be detectable through anomalies in the town plan. In Worcester, as elsewhere, careful scrutiny of variations in the character of streets and the boundary systems of their associated house-plots may disclose the outlines of unrecorded phases in the growth and planning of the city. The constrictions and kinks in the line of the High Street all have meanings: generally that an important former boundary is being crossed.