Nantwich, Cheshire.

So, my wife's friend has just celebrated her 40th Birthday. She has now moved to a place called, Nantwich. A town in Cheshire. I have never been to Nantwich, and have rarely been this way in the UK. I did however, begin my University career at Keele, which is in the area but apart from this I haven't made my way here often. So it was all a surprise really.

It's a nice little town, about 12,000 souls. Parts of it indicate a fairly high amount of these souls are pretty wealthy, more so in the outlying rural villages I imagine. For instance, in my town there are neither 'Aga' cooking range shops nor a large amount of designer menswear shops and lots of 'Holistic' healing clinics. That is not to say Nantwich is uber posh. I imagine that there are other towns and villages that are far more Cheshire set than Nantwich. It does though, have a very nice town centre. In fact, strangely it seems to have two, seperate and distinct town centres. The first and most attractive one is based around the church and the large green in front of it, which when you first approach seems a little bit like a village green. It is only as you get closer do you see the signs telling you that this piece of grassed land in the centre of the town square is actually, consecrated burial ground and not for walking on. And all the older shops circumnavigate this piece of green. I presume that there is some form of conservation area here as many of the usual shops have had to put their shops in buildings that blend into their surroundings, as oppose to vice-versa where certain brands etc tend to impose awful buildings into nice areas, architecturally speaking.

And this is the strangeness of Nantwich. You have a small town centre, with a very attractive Parish church as the focal point, around which you have a certain style of architecture that fits in with this and you then have the Tudor Jewell in this town centre crown. The 'Crown Hotel'. 

Here the citation shows how old the present timber framed building is, rebuilt 30yrs into the reign of Elizabeth I. Replacing an even older coach house, for those not familiar with coach houses, imagine them as stop over points between towns and cities that facilitated communications, the fire in 1583 represented the almost total destruction of Nantwich. Yet, this building is still 430 years old and in some ways reminds me of the town of my birth, Dartmouth, which has quite a few Tudor/Elizabethan buildings and street scenes. 

Where Nantwich is a little 'odd', is to be found near this typical old fashoned town centre where there is another town centre, a dual opposite. walking just a few hundred yards and past the odd corner and you arrive at what I would term a typical 60's town centre, rows of horrific shop fronts, with no architectural soul and no real quality shops (they all tend to be within the other town centre). A collection of charity shops and home bargains. It was like walking from one town into an entirely different town by just turning a corner. It was very surprising and quite a shame. I guess this is why Chester still remains the jewel of Cheshire. Annoyingly you have an inkling that Nantwich at some point, may have rivaled Chester, yet now this battle has long been lost. A shame, as most towns and cities have also discovered, the post war period of town planning and progress has not always turned out well. The only good thing here is that the conservation area has been protected pretty well by the Local Authority and the town centre is still quite bustling. 

Here is an image of the 'first' town centre, in the conservation area, on the right of the picture is the 'crown hotel'. 

Nantwich has a certain charm. It also had a charity bookshop that sold the complete & Unabridged works of the Czech author, Franz Kafka, one of my particular favourite writers, for the princely sum of £2.50 which ensures if nothing else, they read well in Nantwich.