There is nowhere else like this. Town planners and architectural historians have looked. They have found loggias in Italy, riads in Morocco, arcades in Paris, but nothing quite matches the Chester Rows - two levels of shops running along the four main streets of an English city, with the upper level set back behind a continuous covered walkway, and the lower level half a storey below the street. They are eight hundred years old. They are still in daily commercial use. The shops on the Row level today sell coffee and books and outdoor gear, and the timber half-timbered Victorian frontages above them lean out over the medieval undercrofts below in a way that should not really work but does. The Rows are the reason Chester does not look like anywhere else in Britain. Or, in fact, anywhere else at all.
Stand on Bridge Street looking up. At street level is a row of shops, several of them entered by going down a few steps - this is normal for the city, where ground floors sit half a storey below the modern pavement. Above them, on the first floor, is another row of shops. To get to them you climb a short flight of stairs to a covered walkway, set back from the street behind a railing. The walkway runs continuously along the building front. Above the walkway, the second floor of the building overhangs and roofs it. The upper-level shops have their doors opening directly onto the walkway. There is space on the street-side of the walkway, between the railings and the shop fronts, that was historically used for stalls and display shelves. The result is a two-level commercial street, with a covered walkway suspended halfway up between them. The architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner pointed out that calling the ground floors crypts is not strictly accurate - their floors are only a half-storey, not a full storey, below the street.
Nobody knows for certain. Dendrochronological evidence - the dating of timbers by their growth rings - shows that the Rows go back at least to the thirteenth century. They run on streets that were laid out by the Romans, who established the fortress of Deva around AD 75, and one theory says the Rows sit on top of the rubble of collapsed Roman buildings - the elevated walkways being an accidental architectural response to the unusual ground level the rubble created. Another theory is more dramatic. In 1278 a catastrophic fire destroyed almost the entire town within the walls. After it, the suggestion goes, owners may have been required to make their ground floors fireproof, leading to the construction of stone-lined undercrofts that now form the crypts below the Rows. From there, the city's merchants may have collectively decided to extend the commercial floor upward, giving each property two levels of shopfront and twice the visible window display. The 1862 writer George Borrow proposed a different theory in his book Wild Wales: that the Rows existed for defence against Welsh raids, with the upper level designed so that doors could be sealed and missiles dropped on intruders from above. It is a wonderful story. It is almost certainly not true.
About twenty stone undercrofts still exist - the medieval ground-floor vaults beneath the Rows, dating from the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Some are simple barrel vaults. Some are more elaborate, with chamfered arches and multiple bays. The Falcon Inn on Lower Bridge Street has an undercroft that originally had three bays, now divided into two chambers. Number 11 Watergate Street has a two-naved undercroft with four bays. Crypt Chambers on Eastgate Street, designed by T.M. Penson in 1858 in the Gothic Revival style, sits on top of a four-bay medieval undercroft. The most remarkable surviving building is Three Old Arches on Bridge Street - whose stone frontage of three round arches is probably the earliest identifiable shopfront in England. Above the arches the date 1274 has been carved, though the present timber upper floors are later. The building keeps its undercroft, its medieval hall, and its arched stone shopfront, making it as close to a complete thirteenth-century commercial building as Chester possesses.
The Rows were continuous in all the main streets until the seventeenth century. Then Lower Bridge Street started to come apart. In 1643, during the Civil War siege of Chester, Sir Richard Grosvenor moved his family from his country house at Eaton Hall into his town house at the north end of Lower Bridge Street - the building now known as The Falcon Inn. To enlarge the house, he gained permission to enclose his section of the Row, sealing the walkway and absorbing it into the building. It set a fashion. Other Lower Bridge Street houses followed his example. By 1676 Lady Calveley had built a completely new house there, Bridge House, in the neoclassical style, with no Row at all - the first building in Chester to break the medieval pattern. In 1699 the lawyer John Mather added another at number 51. In 1728 Roger Ormes enclosed his Row at Tudor House to make an extra room. Lower Bridge Street still has gaps in its walkway today as a direct result of seventeenth and eighteenth century domestic ambition.
The Rows survive because they kept working. They are not a museum. About 95 buildings containing Row sections are listed - nine at Grade I, twenty at Grade II*, sixty-six at Grade II - but the listings document buildings that are still shops, offices, restaurants, cafes, and private dwellings. Most modern visitors do not realise, walking the upper-level walkway, that they are doing something with no real parallel anywhere else in the world. The street life of medieval Chester has continued, more or less seamlessly, into the present. Since 1995 the area has been substantially pedestrianised. Department stores and small independent shops share frontage along the same Rows that medieval merchants used to display cloth and ironwork. In 2010 the Chester Rows were proposed for the UK Tentative List for World Heritage status, a campaign pledge picked up by local MP Samantha Dixon in the 2022 by-election. They have not yet been inscribed. But they are still being walked, still being shopped, still being lived above and below, exactly as they were in the thirteenth century.
Located at 53.19 degrees north, 2.89 degrees west, in the heart of Chester at the medieval crossroads of Bridge Street, Watergate Street, Eastgate Street and Northgate Street. Best viewed from 2,000 to 3,000 feet, where the distinctive cross-shaped layout of the medieval streets meeting at Chester Cross is clearly visible inside the rectangular city walls. The black-and-white half-timbered buildings of Eastgate and Bridge Street are unmistakable from the air. Hawarden (EGNR) is 4 nautical miles west, Liverpool John Lennon (EGGP) to the north, RAF Shawbury (EGOS) to the south.