The Georgian Society for East Yorkshire funded An Historical Map of Beverley, which was commissioned by the Historic Towns Trust as part of its Town & City Historical Maps series. Current members of the society have received copiers. Publication was made possible by a generous grant from the GSEY, thanks to the recent legacy from a late member, Miss Margaret Dibb (1920-2019). Miss Dibb, a retired solicitor from Cherry Burton, was a keen supporter of the Society’s work, and it is in her memory that the map has been published. It is a collaboration between four Beverley historians/archaeologists: David Neave, Susan Neave, Barbara English and Dave Evans. The map includes a summary of the town’s history, and on the reverse there is an illustrated gazetteer giving brief details of the main features shown.
Based on a digitised Ordnance Survey map of 1908, and put together by the Trust’s skilled cartographer, Giles Darkes, the full colour map charts Beverley’s history across the centuries. The location of major buildings and other features (many long gone) are identified, showing how the streetscape has changed over time. The railway station, for example, built in 1846, stands partly on the medieval moated site of the Preceptory of the Knights Hospitaller, a victim of the Reformation. On North Bar Within the buildings between Vicar Lane and Tiger Lane began life as the Tiger Inn, one of Beverley’s chief meeting places in the Georgian period. Norfolk Street, close to the Molescroft boundary, was once flanked by the East Riding House of Correction to the south and by a Victorian military barracks to the north.
Although much rebuilding had taken place in the Georgian period and beyond, by 1908 there had been comparatively little change to Beverley’s medieval street pattern. Wednesday Market had been broken into on the east side in the 1840s with the building of Railway Street, providing a link to the station, but Lord Roberts Road had not yet been laid out. This would come just a year after the map was surveyed. This necessitated the demolition of the Baptist chapel on Well Lane; its replacement, built on the new road in 1910, is now the East Riding Theatre. Major changes were to come later in the century, including the construction of Wylies Road, Sow Hill Road and New Walkergate, but even now a medieval resident would have little difficulty in finding their way from North Bar to Beckside, with St Mary’s church, the Minster and the two marketplaces as familiar landmarks along the route.
What stands out in particular is the amount of green space within the town at the beginning of the 20th century. Beverley was described in 1868 as a ‘garden-girdled town’, and forty years later this was still true. Inevitably many of the gardens that once surrounded the larger houses have now been built on, notably those of Lairgate Hall, developed with local authority housing in the 1920s. It is, however, on land shown on the map as industrial, notably the area around the Beck, and the Keldgate and Flemingate tannery sites, that some of the more recent housing developments have been built. The town is still surrounded by over 1,000 acres of common land, offering grazing and recreational space.
An Historical Map of Beverley is published by the Historic Towns Trust, 2022
Price: £9.99. ISBN 978-1-8380719-1-2
Local stockist: Beverley Bookshop