ABSTRACT
Church. Whether this is the chapel from which the street takes its name is the source of some dispute locally. Some argue that St Mary’s stands on an ancient holy site that gives the town its name - ‘pen’ meaning ‘headland’ as in peninsular and ‘sans’ meaning ‘holy’. Others argue that the street takes its name from the Chapel of St Anthony, the location of which has been lost. Either way, the street that runs along a ridge from the church on the headland towards the heart of the town was already ancient when put to the torch by the Spanish. In the book Treasure Island, the narrator Jim Hawkins lives at his parents’ inn, the Admiral Benbow, which can still be found on Chapel Street. One day a stranger, Billy Bones, arrives: ‘This is a handy cove’ he says, ‘and a pleasantly sittyated grog-shop’. Billy Bones dies having been given the Black Spot by Blind Pew and Jim finds a chart in his sea chest, escaping the inn just before it is ransacked by pirates. So starts the story in which Jim, together with the local squire and doctor, set off to find the treasure marked on the map with a hired crew – who turn out to be pirates. This, at least, is the imagined history of Chapel Street, a haunt for pirates and smugglers in the wild south west. But the Chapel Street of 1881, when Treasure Island was published, was already a very different place. Robert Louis Stevenson’s den of pirates, if it ever existed, had long been replaced by something more civilised and Georgian. The street is one of the most unified Georgian streets in the country. Its youngest building, number 12, might just have been completed in the first few years of the 20th century; before that, the most recent facade belongs
to the Methodist Hall, which was enlarged in 1864, and a clutch of buildings including the rebuilt St Mary’s Church and the Egyptian House from the 1830s. Most of the street, however, dates from the late 1700s, although some of these buildings are constructed on the bones of much older structures. At its seaward end around the church, the street is residential in character. The row of brick-built cottages know, as the Rotterdam Buildings were reputedly built from the proceeds of privateering against Dutch traders, bricks being rarer and of a higher status in a town otherwise built of granite. One of these was lived in by Mary Branwell, who would later be mother to the Brontë sisters. Opposite this stands a classical building now occupied by the Penzance Arts Club but originally the Portuguese Embassy. As you walk towards the centre of the town, the residential character of the street gives way to more commercial buildings. In addition to the Admiral Benbow, the street includes the Union Hotel – within which survive the remains of a Georgian theatre dating from 1787 – where the victory of the Battle of Trafalgar was first announced. Of even
greater antiquity are the Turk’s Head, reputed to be the oldest inn in the town, and the Regent, which began life as a temperance hotel some 400 years ago. The most idiosyncratic building on the street is, however, the Egyptian House, designed in 1836 by the Plymouth
architect John Foulston to house the geological museum of a local collector, John Lavin. This was built in the Egyptian Revival style that was all the craze in the 1830s following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone and the publication of prints from Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign. The building is a gloriously eccentric landmark of the street, recently restored by the Landmark Trust. The Egyptian House is Chapel Street’s only Grade I listed building but there are a total of 50 buildings on the street, including four at Grade II*. However, as the historic building surveyor Ashley Baker says in his personal assessment of Chapel Street, ‘the street is neither grand nor formal and with one or two exceptions its buildings are unlikely to figure in volumes of architectural history. It is in its subtle, lively variety of building forms and uses, grouped closely between the dome of the Market House and tower of St Mary’s Church that the character of the street is established.’ This is the beauty of Chapel Street: its gentle twist and curve that opens up to reveal a view of the church and the sea, its informal unity of architecture and style and its continued variety of uses and activities. All this is spoilt only slightly by a rather intrusive one-way traffic system, double yellow-lines and road signs, but then you can’t escape the 20th and 21st centuries entirely.
