Hoole and the Railways: Difference between revisions

 

=== The impact of the railways on the small settlement of Hoole ===

In 1841, the small village of Hoole was part of a world where the parish boundary of St. Peter's Church, Plemstall (or ''Plemondstall'' as it was called in the tithe records) and the city parishes of St. Oswald's and St. John's still shaped the identity of the community and an appreciation of what was lawful. The rigid social hierarchy was based on aristocratic landowners with shared certainties in their religious and political principles and matters of taste. Major landowners included the Earl of Shrewsbury and the Hamilton and Brittain families.

 

 

The nature of railways meant around-the-clock working. That demanded that houses had to be built close to the station or the engine shed. This, in turn, led to the building of some of the terraced houses in Hoole.

Development spread from a nucleus around Faulkner Street. Streets of modest terraced housing spread towards the London and North Western Railway Goods yard and across Hoole Road towards the Great Western Railway goods and engine shed. The map below clearly shows the position of the competing railway lines and the proposed site of what became the present Chester station.

Hoole Bridge curves instead of going in a straight line on from Hoole Way because as the 1846 map shows, the railway was built directly across the historic straight route from Brook Street onto the turnpike of Hoole Road (a toll road which began at Flookersbrook, run by a Turnpike Trust).

=== Jobs ===

The 1851 to 1881 census returns for Hoole show the arrival of railway workers from far away, including a railway inspector from Scotland living in Hoole Villas, locomotive firemen in Peploe Street (now Westminster Road), who had arrived from Penzance, and the Railway Manager, William Peabody from Northamptonshire who lived in Lightfoot Street.

 

The railways had created a new class of people –the commuters!