Qualla: Truro

Truro: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit EvaK, CC BY-SA 2.5. On a January night in 1646, with General Fairfax's Parliamentary army pressing through the West Country, the Royalist commanders at Truro made their last calculation. The garrison had raised a sizeable force for Charles I. Truro's mint had stamped the king's coinage. Now the cause was lost. The senior officers, Lord Hopton, the Prince of Wales, Sir Edward Hyde and Lord Capell, slipped down to Falmouth and across to Jersey. The town that bears the title of Cornwall's only city has spent a very long time being the place where Cornwall's biggest decisions get made and then unmade. It is the southernmost city in the United Kingdom, sitting 232 miles west-southwest of London, in a steep bowl where two rivers, the Kenwyn and the Allen, become the Truro and then the Fal.

Read more: Truro on Qualla

Image: EvaK | CC BY-SA 2.5

Truro: Three Rivers, Three Streets

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RuthAS, CC BY 3.0. The name Truro may come from the Cornish tri-veru, meaning "three rivers," though Oliver Padel and the Oxford Dictionary of English Place-Names have always thought that derivation possible rather than certain. Other readings give "the town on the rivers," "the town on the Roman r...

Read more: Truro on Qualla

Image: RuthAS | CC BY 3.0

Truro: The London of Cornwall

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mezzotint by C. Turner, 1835, after W. Brockedon 1835, CC BY 4.0. The Black Death gutted Truro and the recovery took centuries. The Tudor years rebuilt the place. In 1589 Elizabeth I issued a new charter granting an elected mayor and control over the port of Falmouth, which began a rivalry the two towns settled only in 1709, splitting the River...

Read more: Truro on Qualla

Image: Mezzotint by C. Turner, 1835, after W. Brockedon 1835 | CC BY 4.0

Truro: City Status, 1877

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tim Green from Bradford, CC BY 2.0. Truro was made a city by Queen Victoria in 1877, the year after the Diocese of Truro was created. The Gothic Revival cathedral that defines the skyline rose between 1880 and 1910 over the bones of the parish church of St Mary, whose south aisle was kept on as St Mary's Aisle and ...

Read more: Truro on Qualla

Image: Tim Green from Bradford | CC BY 2.0

Truro: Living in the Bowl

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Rogerson, CC BY-SA 2.0. Cornwall Council moved to Truro from Bodmin in 1889, and although Bodmin held the Assizes until 1972, Truro has been the seat of Cornish government for more than a century. About 21,000 people live in the parish itself, with a built-up area closer to 23,000. About 22,000 jobs sit...

Read more: Truro on Qualla

Image: Richard Rogerson | CC BY-SA 2.0