The Pepperpot stands alone now, a 17th-century church tower topped with a copper-clad cupola, marooned in a riverside churchyard with no church to belong to. The body of St Peter and St Paul was demolished long ago - the present church a quarter-mile away was built in the Victorian era by Sir Arthur Blomfield. But the tower survives, and so does the local nickname, and on summer evenings the swallows fly tight figures around it while the Severn glides past forty yards below. For most of its history Upton was defined by that river. Until the late 20th century the bridge here was the only crossing of the Severn between Worcester and Tewkesbury - which is why, in the summer of 1651, Oliver Cromwell's men were so desperate to seize it.
Upton sits on the western bank of the Severn five miles south-east of Malvern, a small grid of red-brick Georgian and earlier streets running back from the river. The 2021 census found 2,903 people in the parish, which extends west to include Tunnel Hill but not the village of Ryall on the opposite bank. The town has always been a crossing place rather than a destination. The present bridge dates from 1940 - the third or fourth on the same alignment - and replaced a Victorian iron span that had itself replaced earlier medieval and 18th-century structures. The Severn has not always been kind. Low-lying parts of the town flood most years in spring and early summer; the 1947 inundation was bad, the 2000 floods worse, and the 2007 floods exceeded both. For days that summer the town was unreachable by road, and it was on national news bulletins that millions of viewers learned how to pronounce Upton.
The pretty little tower at the top of the High Street is the only surviving fragment of the old church of St Peter and St Paul. Built in stages from the 14th century onwards, the church was abandoned in stages too - first damaged in the Civil War, then partly rebuilt, then finally found inadequate for a growing Victorian town. By the 1870s a replacement church (also dedicated to St Peter and St Paul) had been built nearby by Sir Arthur Blomfield, son of the Bishop of London and one of the most prolific church architects of the 19th century. The old building was demolished, but the tower with its 17th-century copper cupola was kept as a landmark. Why a cupola and not a spire? Because the original 14th-century tower had become unsafe in the Civil War, was capped with the cupola in 1769, and ever afterwards looked, to local eyes, exactly like an outsized pepper shaker. The nickname stuck. The Pepperpot is now a small heritage centre and one of the most photographed buildings in Worcestershire.
Upton was once the lay rectorship of one of the most extraordinary intellects of Tudor England. John Dee - mathematician, astronomer, alchemist, court astrologer to Elizabeth I, advisor on the Northwest Passage, possible inspiration for Shakespeare's Prospero - was granted the rectorship of Upton upon Severn in 1553. The position was a sinecure; Dee did not have to live here, or perform any religious functions, but he did receive the income from the church lands. He used such grants to fund his enormous library at Mortlake, which by the 1580s held more than 4,000 books and manuscripts at a time when the King's library held about 60. Dee chose the date for Elizabeth I's coronation. He coined the term "British Empire." He spent the last years of his life in poverty. The lay rectorship of a little Worcestershire river town was, in 1553, exactly the kind of small, paper-shuffling office that the Tudor state used to subsidise its more inconvenient geniuses.
On the morning of 28 August 1651, with King Charles II's Scottish army holed up in Worcester and Cromwell's New Model Army approaching from the south, the bridge at Upton became, briefly, the most important river crossing in England. The Royalist commander Major-General Edward Massey held the town with about 300 dragoons and had broken down one arch of the bridge, leaving only a narrow plank across the gap. Just before dawn Cromwell's officer John Lambert sent 18 dragoons across that plank, swimming the rest of his men through a ford the locals had betrayed. The defenders were caught at prayer in the church (the old St Peter and St Paul). Massey was wounded; his men were routed; the bridge was saved and repaired. Six days later, on 3 September 1651, Cromwell crushed Charles II at the Battle of Worcester - the final battle of the Civil War. The Skirmish at Upton was the engagement that made Worcester possible. The little churchyard where the dragoons fought is still there, and the Pepperpot still stands above it.
Two other names attach to the town. Admiral Sir William Tennant, born here in 1890, commanded the Royal Navy's evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940 - it was Tennant who organised the chaos of the Dunkirk mole and improvised the loading of 200,000 men onto whatever could float. The Royal Navy lost six destroyers and 64 other vessels in nine days; Tennant left on the last ship, after telling the BBC "BEF evacuated" in clear. He is the man whose dispatches Churchill turned into the "finest hour" speech. General Sir George Alexander Weir, born in Upton in 1876, commanded an army corps on the Western Front in 1918. Two senior officers in two world wars, from a riverside town of less than 3,000 people - and a bridge that, given the Severn's habit of carrying things off, has had to be rebuilt at least five times. The locks on the Severn at Upton are still busy with narrowboats. The marina is home to Mercia Inshore Search and Rescue. The Pepperpot's cupola, in afternoon light, still glows the colour of an old penny.
Located at 52.0625°N, 2.215°W on the west bank of the River Severn, about 5 miles south-east of Great Malvern. Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 ft AGL. The Pepperpot tower is small but distinctive; the river curves through the town and the bridge is the most easily spotted feature. Nearest airfields: Gloucestershire (EGBJ) 13 nm south, Wolverhampton (EGBO) 28 nm north-east. The Malvern Hills ridge dominates the western horizon five miles away.