Qualla: Southwell

Southwell: Introduction

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alan Murray-Rust, CC BY-SA 2.0. Locals pronounce it SUH-thull, with a voiced th and a silent w, although the residents of Southwell itself increasingly say it the way it is spelt. The town never quite became a city, despite hosting one of England's most architecturally distinctive cathedrals, because in 1884 nobody thought to file the right paperwork. The town's economy never depended on coal, which is why it stayed visibly affluent while Newark and Mansfield rose and fell. And in a back garden on Church Street, sometime in 1809, a young woman named Mary Ann Brailsford planted a pip from an apple she had eaten and grew the tree that became, eventually, the Bramley.

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Image: Alan Murray-Rust | CC BY-SA 2.0

Southwell: Roman Villa, Saxon Saint

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graham Hogg, CC BY-SA 2.0. In 1959, excavators digging beneath the Minster and its churchyard uncovered the remains of an opulent Roman villa, one of only three of its type known from the territories of the Corieltauvi tribe. Part of a mural from the dig is now displayed inside the Minster itself. The Vene...

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Image: Graham Hogg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Southwell: The Saracen's Head and a Surrendered King

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Julian P Guffogg, CC BY-SA 2.0. On Church Street stands the Saracen's Head, a coaching inn built in 1463 on land that had been gifted to John and Margaret Fysher in 1396 by Archbishop Thomas Arundel. It became one of the most consequential buildings in seventeenth-century English history. In May 1646, with the ...

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Image: Julian P Guffogg | CC BY-SA 2.0

Southwell: Lord Byron, Mary Ann Brailsford, and a Pip

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Smb1001, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1803 Lord Byron, then fifteen and the new sixth Baron Byron of Rochdale, spent his school holidays with his mother in Burgage Manor, rented because Newstead Abbey was unaffordably dilapidated. He wrote a few poems here, including the splendidly tasteless Epitaph of John Adams,...

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Image: Smb1001 | CC BY-SA 4.0

Southwell: The Workhouse and the Town That Stayed

Wed, 27 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit GavinJA, CC BY-SA 3.0. On the edge of town, the Southwell Workhouse opened in 1824 as a prototype of the punitive parish-by-parish system that the New Poor Law of 1834 would impose across England. It was designed by architect William Adams Nicholson working alongside Rev. John Thomas Becher, a local cl...

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Image: GavinJA | CC BY-SA 3.0