Exeter History: The City’s Story Told Through Its Buildings

At Exeter, the motorway stops. The trainline gets slower. The data coverage gets worse. And for a while, the Roman Empire ended here too.

Exeter was founded as a frontier town, and it has the odd distinction of this reputation largely being the same now as it was 2,000 years ago. It is a long way from anywhere, and it always has been.

Which is part of why it all too often gets forgotten about. Compared to equally historic cities it doesn’t have the same tourist infrastructure, the same pull, the same lore.

Some of that isn’t its fault: it was the first city bombed in the Baedeker Blitz, and what the Luftwaffe started, the planning department finished. But that comes later.

I should say, Exeter is also my hometown. Perhaps I’m biased. But I couldn’t resist the opportunity to dig into its history a bit more – one that’s relatively little known, but regardless, fascinating.

This is the first of two parts: the story of how a fort at the end of a Roman road became a city, told through the buildings that made it.

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Roman Exeter: a fort at the edge of the Empire

When the Romans first conquered Britain in AD 43, they quickly spread. In the South West, over the course of about a decade, they made it as far as a river known by the local Celts as Iska.

Beyond it, was a mysterious wilderness, miles of rugged coastline, and the tribes that lived there.

So here, on the site that would eventually become Exeter, the Romans built a fort. It sat at the end of Fosse Way, the road that ran all the way to Lincoln and which for a while marked the edge of Roman Britain. Much of it is still in use by modern roads.

The fort acted as the furthest South West reach of the Roman Empire – beyond it were (and still are, if the way the Cornish deal with scones is anything to go by) barbarians. Or, to call them their proper name, the Dumnonii, inhabiting Cornwall and West Devon.

It was the base of the Second Augusta, one of just a handful of Roman legions in Britain. They didn’t hang around too long, though.

The Dumnonii might not have been civilised in the eyes of the Romans, but they weren’t very aggressive either. So the legion spent a couple of decades sitting around doing nothing.

Their most famous action, in fact, was to refuse to support the Roman army as it fought Boudica’s revolt. When the head of Exeter’s legion found out that the revolt has been defeated, and that he’d denied his men a share in the glory, he fell on his sword.

A little while later, the legion moved to Wales, where they were much busier subduing the hostile locals.

That could have been the end of it, I suppose. A ruined fortress in the countryside. But people chose to move close to the fortress from surrounding areas, for its infrastructure and security, and over time, a town was formed.

Today just about all that remains is Exeter’s Roman and Medieval wall – though much of it comes from later centuries. It flourished as an urban centre on the outer-reaches of the Roman Empire – though because of its location, it was never an important centre in the way that, for example, Colchester or St Albans were.

After the Romans left, the Anglo Saxons added their word for a Roman fort (“ceaster”) to the river’s name: Escanceaster, eventually morphing into Exeter.

Saxon Exeter: Alfred the Great, the Vikings and Gandy Street

Like much of Britain, we know little about the immediate centuries after the Romans left. From this largely mysterious period of Exeter’s history we get one of its prettiest streets.

Alfred the Great, who ruled in the 9th century, spent a great deal of energy on Exeter, having to deal with the Vikings there not just once but twice. The Vikings even managed to successfully take the city in 876, leading to Alfred strengthening the entire wall system when he eventually got it back.

We see his work in the walls today, much of which comes from this era. But he also gave us Gandy Street.

It’s the place I’d always take visiting friends to, proudly repeating the slightly dubious claim that Diagon Alley in Harry Potter is based on the street.

The buildings are of course later. As is the name, memorialising a 17th century mayor, rather than a misspelling of Mahatma Gandhi, as I always thought as a child. But Gandy Street follows a Saxon street pattern, laid out by Alfred the Great.

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Rougemont Castle and William the Conqueror’s siege of Exeter

After the Norman Conquest in 1066, Exeter found itself briefly thrust back into national importance.

William the Conqueror defeated the King of England, Harold Godwinson, at the Battle of Hastings. His mum, Gytha Thorkelsdottir, wasn’t, naturally, very happy about this. She also happened to live in Exeter.

The city became a centre of Anglo Saxon resistance against the new rulers, the first major resistance the Normans faced after their victory at Hastings. So William marched on Devon, besieging it for 18 days. Those old Roman walls, bolstered by the Saxon Kings’ renovations, helped it hold out. But eventually, William secured the city.

It ended in a very understated, Exeter sort of way. William and Gytha negotiated, and the city was his. He didn’t hold too much of a grudge – he didn’t even raise taxes on the city.

But still, William needed to feel secure. So he built a castle, using the local volcanic stone, which is a distinctive red. This gave the castle its name: Rougemont, Red Mount. Many historic buildings across the city use this stone, giving it its distinctive look.

This was all in the pretty immediate aftermath of the Battle of Hastings, the castle being complete at some point in 1068. This gives Exeter one of its strongest claims to fame: possibly the earliest Norman castle structure surviving in the country.

Today, all that’s really left is the gatehouse, behind which courts were built in the 17th century. It was here, in 1685, that three women from nearby Bideford were tried for witchcraft, before being executed in nearby Heavitree – the last people hanged for witchcraft in England.

Exeter Cathedral, the underground passages and a medieval murder

If Exeter is ever brought up in discussions of architecture, it’s usually because of its massive, Gothic Cathedral.

It’s so impressive that, as a child, it left me disappointed just about any time I visited a different town or city, not quite understanding why larger and more famous places had Cathedrals that could barely hold a candle to our own.

Things could have been different. For a long time, the local see was based in nearby Crediton. But this was an undefended village, and this was an era when Vikings could appear at any point.

The bishops sought approval from the Pope himself to move their base to Exeter, behind the protection of those walls.

The oldest part left of the Cathedral are its two Norman towers, dating from the 12th century. But most of the building is from the 13th, when the Bishop was inspired to redevelop the building following a visit to Salisbury. It took many decades.

Much of Exeter’s history is based around this building. It turned a small, South Westerly outpost into a city of genuine importance. It’s home, for example, to the Exeter Book – the largest surviving collection of Old English poetry. It was also here that, centuries later, William of Orange’s declaration was read out.

And speak to a local tour guide, and they’ll reel off a list of its architectural achievements. Top of the list is the Cathedral’s ceiling – having the longest uninterrupted medieval stone vaulted ceiling in the world. Quite a specific fact. But standing underneath it, it’s awe-inspiring nonetheless.

So the Cathedral is clearly Exeter’s most iconic landmark. But it also gave it its most unusual, albeit one that is hidden from view.

Exeter has no natural clean water supply, so at some point in the 14th century the Cathedral built underground vaults, large enough for a person to walk through so that they could access them to fix without having to dig up the street.

These tunnels brought water into the city, originally divided between the Cathedral, St Nicholas Priory and the city itself. Gradually more were built, and over time wealthy Exonians began to dig their own.

The result is an incredibly extensive surviving underground network. They’re the only medieval passages of their kind open to the public in the country.

Stretching around the Cathedral are the Green, nowadays mostly home to local college kids eating supermarket sandwiches and seagulls hoovering up their crumbs, and the Cathedral Close, one of the most beautiful stretches of buildings in the city.

Peaceful though it is, this was also the site of a murder which scandalised medieval England.

It came from an age old dispute between the city authorities and the Cathedral, who saw themselves as above the city’s jurisdiction.

The result was that as a man named Walter de Lechlade, one of the cathedral’s senior-most clergymen, walked himself home one evening in November 1283, he was descended on by three hired assassins, and murdered.

It was such a scandal that King Edward I himself personally came to town to see over the trial. The mayor was executed, along with several other people of high status.

We can still see the direct results of the murder if we walk around the Cathedral. The King ordered a wall to be built around the close, with gates that could be locked at night – some of which still survive.

Exeter’s wool cloth trade: the Guildhall and Tuckers Hall

Part of my motivation for dedicating two posts to my home city of Exeter is an admittedly biased belief that the city deserves more credit. Compared to other historic cities, its story is one rarely told, a place far less visited by tourists.

Much of the city’s beauty comes from its golden era, a period stretching from the 15th to the 18th centuries, when Exeter grew extremely wealthy.

The source of its wealth was wool cloth, which would be exported from the city all over Europe. By the 18th century, it was responsible for a quarter of the country’s wool cloth trade, providing employment to most people in the city. It would lead to Exeter becoming, by some counts, the third wealthiest city in the country.

A big reason for this was Calvinist refugees. These were people who fled the Low Countries in the 16th and 17th century due to the Eighty Year’s War, a conflict in part caused by religious tensions between the Catholic rulers and a rising movement of Protestantism. Later, a wave of Huguenot refugees from France joined them.

Many were skilled in the textile industry, introducing advanced techniques, and helping to establish trade networks across the continent.

Water-powered mills were built along the River Exe to produce wool cloth at a rapid speed. Exeter especially became famous for a type of wool cloth called serge, which was both durable and lightweight. The economy boomed.

Two buildings in the town centre still hark back to this period of flourishing.

The first is the Guildhall, for centuries the centre of municipal power, and which claims to be the oldest municipal building still in use.

The current building went up in the 1460s, on a spot where a guild is recorded as early as the year 1000. It has a handsome Renaissance façade, dating from the late 16th century.

It was here where traders would come, guilds would meet, and matters of local importance would be decided. It remains part of civic life: when Exeter’s football team got promoted to League One a few years ago, the team celebrated from the ancient Guildhall’s balcony, fans cheering them from below.

From the Guildhall, Exeter’s town centre slopes away towards the river Exe. About five minutes down this hill is another building – less famous, but just as important.

Tuckers Hall was built in the late 15th century, originally as a Guild chapel. This religious history is clear in its appearance.

In 1620, James I established the Incorporation of Weavers, Fullers and Shearmen, giving it control over who could produce Exeter cloth and to what standard. It also received independence from the city Chamber.

Tuckers Hall was their home. The name comes from the word ‘tucker’, a West Country word for pounding woollen cloth to thicken it.

It’s one of very few surviving guild halls of its kind in the country.

For centuries, the people represented in this building brought wealth into the city. It’s worth being clear about who this wealth belonged to.

The merchants who ran the trade built the town houses and sat in the Guildhall. But most of the work was done by people who lived and worked down the hill, as well as those in nearby towns like Crediton and Tiverton. Unlike the merchants, these people mostly didn’t have buildings to leave behind.

Countess Wear: the weir that held Exeter back for 250 years

This golden period came very much against the odds, because from an early point, Exeter’s economy had things stacked against it.

For much of its history, you could pretty much sail up to Exeter’s city walls. That’s what the Romans did. It’s what the Vikings did, too, when they raided it.

But things got a bit more complicated in the 13th century, before the wool cloth trade began to flourish.

If you drive into Exeter, you’ll likely find yourself at some point on an unglamorous, but romantically named roundabout. Countess Wear. Drive a little further, and you’ll cross the River Exe over a bridge with the same name.

This name comes from a woman that reshaped the city’s economy and most likely stunted its growth.

That woman was Isabella de Fortibus, the 8th Countess of Devon, who lived along the river Exe in the 1200s. At some point towards the end of that century, she began blocking the river with a weir.

According to some, she did this purely out of spite, specifically to hurt Exeter’s trade, annoyed at the traders for some reason. According to others, she purposefully left a gap so that ships could carry on to Exeter unimpeded.

Isabella died in 1293, and her Devon estates passed to her cousin, Hugh de Courtenay. Whatever Isabella’s intentions, Hugh’s were not in doubt. In 1317 he closed the gap entirely, and built a quay downriver at what is now Topsham. Ships now had to unload there, pay his rates, and send the goods on to Exeter by cart.

This meant that over the city’s golden era, a great deal of its wealth was going directly to one family who had done nothing to help generate it. It went on for centuries, even as the city grew rich on wool cloth, it was held back by the river being blockaded.

The powerful and rich wool cloth traders pushed and pushed to reopen the river. But the Countess’s descendants were the Courtenay family. They were one of the most powerful families in the country, and essentially ruled this slice of England.

In the mid-16th century, Exeter’s wool cloth traders were given a slice of luck.

Hugh’s descendant, Henry Courtenay, 1st Marquess of Exeter, now owned the land, taking income from passing ships.

Henry was also the grandson of a former king of England, Edward IV. This gave him a royal claim. And in the South West, he acted as if he was king himself.

This was the time of the Reformation, and many of the establishment were deeply unhappy with both the direction of travel, and the legitimacy of their ruler, Henry VIII.

Courtenay, who had a strong regional power base, and the ability to raise a local army, became their great hope.

The plans were uncovered, dubbed the Exeter Conspiracy, and Courtenay was executed. Though I should say, many historians see the Exeter Conspiracy as something manufactured by Thomas Cromwell, rather than a real plot.

Either way, for Exeter the impact was massive. The Courtenay family had essentially blockaded the river for centuries. With Courtenay’s execution, the land was confiscated by the crown, and the river reopened.

But by now it was too late. Thanks to the Courtenay’s weir, the river had silted, and was no longer navigable.

At this point, Exeter was really flourishing as a centre of the wool cloth trade, so it had the money to find a solution. It came in the form of the first canal in Britain to use pound locks, which you can still walk along.

And at the end, the handsome Custom House – the oldest brick building in Exeter, built in 1680-81, and the earliest purpose-built custom house in England.

Using the Custom House and canal, wool cloth would flow out across the continent; wine and luxury goods came back. Isabella got a suburb, a bridge and a roundabout named after her (Countess Wear, even though what she built was a Weir).

Fittingly, the bridge itself would become a bottleneck for Exeter’s rush hour traffic for decades until the M5 was extended; just as her effect on river traffic had been centuries earlier.

Georgian Exeter: Southernhay and the lost Bedford Circus

Exeter has a reputation as a polite, middle class sort of city. As is always the case, the truth is much more complicated than this, as any walk through the town centre will tell you.

But it’s a reputation with a lot of truth to it, and it stretches back several hundred years.

As the industrial revolution began to reshape the country, Exeter found itself unable to keep up with Northern powerhouse towns. Its industry and its wool cloth trade declined – similar to Norwich, which I wrote about a few weeks ago.

In Norwich, this led to a period of real decline. But in Exeter, it was more of a reinvention. In fact, from the early to mid 1800s, despite its declining traditional industries, the city’s population doubled in size.

And its from here that its polite, middle class reputation came from. Because Exeter became a city of retired gentlemen. Clergymen and professionals descended on the town.

They were attracted by the Cathedral, as well as the city’s relatively strong coaching links to London and mild weather. Plus, the lack of industry meant it had clean air – a rare thing for a city during the Industrial Revolution.

New housing estates popped up all over – handsome Georgian terraces and townhouses, home to wealthy families who had largely made their money elsewhere, and moved to the city for a quiet, pleasant life.

We can see this in the city’s architecture – perhaps best of all in Southernhay, a stretch of late Georgian-era houses built on land that had been used as a plague burial ground. It’s not as grand as equivalent developments in Bath, but is impressive nonetheless.

By all accounts though, the most impressive was a place called Bedford Circus. Built in the 1770s on the site of a Dominican friary, it was an elongated oval, once described as “one of the finest pieces of Georgian town-planning in England”.

It was damaged in the Second World War, but its facades survived. Rather than restore them, though, town planners tore Bedford Circus down. It’s considered one of Exeter’s greatest lost pieces of architecture.

Exeter Synagogue: one of the oldest in Britain

This is a piece of history which I must confess, shamefully, I didn’t know about until I began researching this blog, despite living in the city for the first 18 years of my life.

Exeter is home to one of the longest running synagogues in the country.

We know that before the expulsion of the Jews in the 13th century, Exeter had a small but active Jewish community, so it’s a legacy that stretches back a long time.

Jews weren’t readmitted into the country until the 17th century. From the 18th, after the House of Hanover ascended to the British throne, German Jews began to settle in the city.

This small community began congregating in the 1720s, before deciding to found a synagogue.

At the time, Jews weren’t allowed to lease land directly. So its founders Abraham Ezekiel and Kitty Jacobs needed to lease through an intermediary.

The building is exceedingly modest, without any external signage to give a clue of its significance. It opened in the 1760s, consecrated on 10 August 1764. This makes Exeter’s the third oldest synagogue in Britain still in use, after Bevis Marks in London and Plymouth Synagogue.

Over the course of the 19th century, the area around the synagogue became one of the poorest parts of the city – the juxtaposition to the middle class Exeter I wrote about in the previous section. Overcrowded slums, tumbling down the side of the hill, away from the leafy streets inhabited by clergymen and intellectuals.

Meanwhile, the Jewish population declined. By the late 19th century, there were fewer than ten families left, and services were stopped in 1889.

The Synagogue was revived six years later by a man named Charles Samuels, a picture framer born in Latvia. He led the congregation until his death in 1944. Thanks to him, it’s still going.

The slums were cleared away. Now, the Synagogue finds itself tucked away on a side street next to a town centre car park and a smattering of truly terrible nightclubs.

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Victorian Exeter: Brunel’s railway and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum

Exeter never really recovered its ancient importance. But it did have a bit of a Victorian renaissance, largely shaped by two pieces of infrastructure: Brunel’s railway at the start of the 1840s, and the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in the decades after 1861.

The Bristol and Exeter Railway reached St David’s in May 1844, designed by the great engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel. It opened the city up to the rest of the country in a way that it never had been before, helping to spur on its role as a regional commercial centre, which it still holds to this day.

Brunel’s more remarkable Exeter venture was also his least successful. Beyond Exeter, he designed a South Devon line which didn’t use locomotives at all, but atmospheric traction: a vacuum pipe laid between the rails, stationary pumping engines drawing the air out, and trains pulled forward by ordinary atmospheric pressure.

It ran from 1847, it was fast, and it was silent. It also depended on a leather flap sealing a slot along the top of the pipe. Given this line ran along the cold, wet and windy Devon coast, a leather flap as protection didn’t last too long. It was given up after just a year, at heavy cost.

The Italianate pumping house at Starcross, a short trainride out of Exeter on the Exe estuary, is a surviving monument to the idea.

The other main Victorian legacy is the Royal Albert Memorial Museum – or RAMM.

I spent many happy hours here as a child, and still often go back when I return to the city. It’s an excellent, free museum, and one of the better regional museums I’ve yet seen in the country.

A lovely Gothic revival building, it was built in the years after Prince Albert’s death as a ‘practical memorial’ to him. Not just a monument, but a centre of learning and culture. It was paid for by public donations.

What I never appreciated when I visited it as a child, though, is that this building – originally constituted as a Victorian expression of mourning, a ‘practical memorial’ – gave Exeter what would become its modern identity.

It fostered an emphasis on education, which over time morphed into the Royal Albert Memorial College. Over the years, this became the University of Exeter.

This, now, is undoubtedly the biggest institution of the city, one of the best universities in the country, and accounts for a huge portion of the city’s population and economy.

The Exeter Blitz and post-war rebuilding

By the time of the Second World War, Exeter wasn’t terribly important. It had little strategic value, and was surely low down on Hitler’s list of targets.

That was until the Allies bombed the historic German city of Lübeck. Outraged, the Nazis planned a series of attacks called the Baedeker Raids – out of revenge, they would attack British cities with historic and cultural value.

They got their name when a German foreign office spokesman, Baron Gustav Braun von Stumm, said they would bomb every building in Britain marked with three stars in the Baedeker guide.

Exeter got the dubious honour of being first on the list. Over 250 people died in the attacks on Exeter, and a great number of buildings were destroyed. A German radio gloated, describing Exeter as the ‘jewel of the West’, and claiming to have destroyed it.

Exeter Airport acted as the key point of defence, a squadron from the Polish Air Force in Exile taking arms to defend the city.

The Baedeker raids damaged Exeter. And so did, unfortunately, Exeter City Council in the decades after.

A man called Thomas Sharp was called on to lead rebuilding plans. He published a book, titled Exeter Phoenix. Funnily enough this later gave name to an arts centre and site of many beer fuelled gigs in my youth, totally oblivious to the historical connotations of the name.

But pretty much nothing was done according to this plan. Instead, the Council knocked down historical buildings – such as the aforementioned Bedford Circus – and built some classically post-war ones in its place.

Most notable is Bobby’s, a giant (by Exeter’s modest standards) tower which was home to a department store, and is now John Lewis. It towers over the city, one of the tallest buildings in the town centre, and visible from miles around.

Its basement was said to have been built to survive a nuclear attack – it now hosts John Lewis’s technology department. (As an aside, the cafe at the top has pretty awesome views over Exeter).

More offensive is the street of Sidwell Street, lined with flat, faceless, ugly buildings which are, unfortunately, the main route for visiting football fans to the football ground.

The only part of Sharp’s plan to be enacted was Princesshay – a section of the city which had been badly damaged in the Baedeker Blitz, and which was developed into the first purpose built pedestrianised shopping street in the country.

It would only be a few decades before this, too, was demolished, and for much of my childhood the whole area was a building site.

What replaced it is rather good. A genuinely handsome and successful modern development, the ancient Cathedral looming over it.

Which feels like the right place to stop. This is a city that was founded as a frontier fort and then left behind when the frontier moved.

It was besieged by William the Conqueror, had its river blockaded for 250 years by its own aristocracy, was bypassed by the industrial revolution, was bombed for being beautiful, and then had a good deal of what survived knocked down by its own council.

It is now one of the fastest growing cities in the country.

The wall is still there. So is the Cathedral. Sharp got the title of his book right, even if nobody built his plan. Exeter Phoenix.

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