ABSTRACT
A settlement in the Roman, Saxon and Norman eras, Gloucester’s historic significance in part arose out of its strategic site. Located in the Severn valley at a crossing point over the river, Gloucester afforded an obvious highway to the sea and was on a natural line of approach from England to South Wales. By medieval times, the city was long established as a centre of some strategic and trading importance. Although too far up river ‘to be a really great port’, Gloucester was ‘a convenient handling point for the iron and coal of the Forest of Dean’, while also ‘the river port for the rich farmlands of the Severn basin’.1 Its importance as a provincial centre of the Saxon government led to it becoming the county town of Gloucestershire. The Tudors boosted Gloucester still further by creating the Anglican diocese that made the city an administrative centre for religious life. For a short time in the Georgian era the rich were attracted to the Spa district of the city, but as a resort for the gentry Gloucester had declined by the end of the eighteenth century. If nearby and more fashionable Cheltenham Spa eroded the city’s social pretensions, Bristol’s commercial dominance restrained Gloucester’s trade and stifled its attempts to start new industries. Notwithstanding these obstacles eighteenth-century Gloucester’s ‘river trade handled agricultural produce from the surrounding countryside and local manufactures and brought imports from Bristol, goods from South Wales, and coal and industrial products from the West Midlands for the surrounding towns and villages’.2 Port-related activities were central while local raw materials ensured the primacy of the metal industry, notably pin-making and bell manufacture, although wool-stapling and malting were also significant. Georgian Gloucester also had wider functions as a market centre of some importance, these continuing into the second half of the twentieth century.
