Qualla: Chester Rows

Chester Rows: Introduction

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

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Chester Rows: How They Work

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Chester Rows: Where They Come From

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Chester Rows: The Stone Beneath

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 Brid...

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Chester Rows: When the Rows Were Broken

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 n...

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Chester Rows: Living Streets

Mon, 25 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 priv...

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