ABSTRACT
A Celtic, Roman, Saxon and eventually Norman settlement, Exeter’s position on the river Exe made it a trading and commercial centre that eventually became a cathedral city and the county town of Devonshire. Established in the Middle Ages, the manufacture of woollen cloth came of age in Tudor Exeter and became the East Devon staple industry from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Farming too enhanced the local economy, for Exeter was ‘at the centre of a large and rich agricultural district’ and remained so in the twentieth century.1 The Tudor years also saw the construction of the Exeter Canal, the first of England’s canals. The canal was both lengthened and deepened in the seventeenth century and the woollen industry, with serge to the fore, established Exeter as an important port and as a centre of industry and commerce.2 A historian of Exeter argues that economic decline set in as early as the eighteenth century. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars further decayed local manufacturing, with the deathblow to the woollen staple being administered by the Continental System.3 The city retained its commercial, market, shopping and provincial administrative functions however, and by the 1820s improved navigation of the river Exe restored trading links with Europe. The basin of the Exe formed a distinct economic unit, with Exeter and its environs once again exporting to the Netherlands and Central Europe. One of the most important economic scions of the city was the powerful immigrant banking family of Baring, this family establishing the Plymouth (later the Devonshire) Bank in 1770.4
On the eve of Victoria’s reign, Exeter was a ‘rich little city, its once-flourishing woollen industry, and other less known but profitable industries like banking, brewing and tanning’ producing a ‘comparatively large class of “unearned income” receivers’.5 These cadres, with the local gentry and the domiciled retired naval and military officers, helped ensure Victorian Exeter remained a residential and provincial centre for ‘society’ until the 1850s, when the coming of the railway saw these functions ebb towards London.6 On a broader economic front, the early Victorian years saw a further setback when the economic dynamism of Devon shifted towards Plymouth and Devonport. Yet the opening of other opportunities brought about by the rail links helped Exeter to compensate for this loss. The city was boosted by the coming of the Great Western Railway (GWR) in 1844 and the London and South-Western in 1860, Exeter becoming ‘a great transport centre’.7 Victorian Exeter’s general growth, although slow, was fashioned in part by the need to
cities and the centre of county administration as well as having important route junctions. Exeter was such a centre, a city which preserved ‘the atmosphere of an historic town’ but also contained ‘industries combined with a strong commercial life’.9
