15-07-2025
The English high street: Stamford, Lincolnshire – people like living here, so it's thriving
The nice woman with a dustpan and brush, making the blue runner down the church nave spick and span, paused and came over to talk. 'I moved to the middle of Stamford two years ago. I absolutely love it,' she said, waving the brush for emphasis.
This was in the 13th-century All Saints' Church, whose spire punctuates the skyline of the compact town on its hill above the river Welland, beside which the Town Meadows are preserved for public use. I agree with Celia Fiennes, who rode all round England in the 1690s, when she said that Stamford is 'as fine a built town all of stone as may be seen'.
I had visited Stamford every now and then for 30 years, but was worried whether the High Street might now have declined as in many a market town. 'There are not many empty shops in the High Street,' I was assured. All Saints' is thriving too, with 70-100 people on Sundays and completely full at Christmas or Easter.
Walking out into the sunshine, I enjoyed the sight of the Georgian buildings in Red Lion Square. The walls of its buildings 100 years ago were painted with huge advertisements for Freeman, Hardy and Willis and for Currys Cycles (the forerunner of the electrical stores). Now, it has never been sprucer. As everybody knows, Stamford was used 30 years ago for the television serial Middlemarch. The local stone, from renowned quarries at nearby Ketton, Barnack and Clipsham, is a warm biscuit colour.
Stamford sits at the extreme southern end of Lincolnshire, untypical of the county. Rutland, Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire jostle together here with the old territory of the Soke of Peterborough. Stamford escaped the mainline railway, which went to Peterborough instead, leaving Stamford with its Georgian and medieval buildings intact.
But the A1, Great North Road, still chugged past the walls of All Saints'. It had made Stamford prosperous (and supported historical inns such as the George on the other side of the river) but a bypass in 1960 eased the noise, dirt and battering of traffic. Today's population of 20,000 is expected to reach 28,000 by 2038, with the addition of two housing estates. People here are longer-lived, less depressed and less obese than average, with fewer markers of deprivation.
Since the 1970s, the High Street has been pedestrianised, but not left high and dry. Less than 400 yards long, it has about 40 old houses on each side. But it can't be taken in isolation, for long alleys lead off one side to Broad Street ('nearly perfect visually,' as Sir Nikolaus Pevsner remarked in the Lincolnshire volume of The Buildings of England).
At one end of Broad Street is the 15th-century Browne's Hospital. In the middle is St Augustine's Catholic Church (1864), which Pevsner says has 'an unbelievable bell-turret, asymmetrically placed and most crudely detailed'. I rather enjoy its idiosyncrasy, and the Stamford Mercury called it the 'prettiest modern Gothic building in town'.
Broad Street still holds a market every Friday, when you must not leave your car there after 4am. It being a Wednesday, I found the Lord Burghley pretty quiet, with a couple of regulars and an elderly woman with an empty wine glass. I might have gone two doors down to the Stag & Pheasant, as it was in the 19th century (the New Salutation in 1799), where the white painted façade with Watney's lettering has been scraped to reveal glorious 18th-century stonework. Even this conceals an earlier building. The place has never looked better, but it is no longer a pub. Stamford has several old churches and many old pubs, but one can never have too many.
Refreshed, I launched into the High Street and was immediately cheered at No 1. It had been the HSBC, which closed in 2023, but since last year has been Gladwell & Patterson, selling pictures. Katy showed me round. Upstairs the rooms have been done out like those of a house, with a painting of the Salute in Venice over one mantelpiece.
'Gladwell's Corner,' it says over the doorway, echoing the old shop on the corner of Watling Street and Queen Victoria Street in London before Gladwell's moved to Knightsbridge. I felt that this branch in Stamford was part of the trend of urbs in rure that contributes to Stamford's current prosperity.
Stamford is a few minutes by train to Peterborough and then 45 minutes to London. One of its unexpected delights is a stone Tudor station with an octagonal bell-turret, designed in 1848 by the great railway architect Sancton Wood. It used to have the perfect place to spend time before the hourly train: Robert Humm, Britain's largest railway bookshop. After 50 years, Robert and Clare Humm have retired and the station cries out for a replacement, perhaps with coffee.
I had to hurry up or I'd never have got to the end of the High Street. Each building is of historical interest. The Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England devoted a whole large-format book to Stamford, with hundreds of photographs and drawings of doorcases and staircases and hidden timber-framed medieval back premises. The town has 600 listed buildings of special architectural or historic interest.
At 7 High Street, with two lovely 18th-century bow windows, is Brook Taverner, a clothes shop. Before that, it was Ponden Mill homeware shop, and before that, for a long time, a jeweller's. New uses for old buildings have kept the High Street a place where people want to come shopping.
A strange example of Stamford houses hiding their past is 10 High Street. It is now Walkers, a newsagent on the ground floor and a bookshop upstairs. The frontage is of the most florid mock Tudor. But behind the Victorian front is a genuine medieval timber-framed building. In any case, the Stamford Mercury was delighted in 1849 by this 'fine specimen of the revived Tudor style'.
Upstairs, Nicola was putting out books by local authors, such as Will Hetherington's Will's Pub Walks. Customers also take part in a monthly Poetry in the Bookshop event, listening or reading their own. Nicola has lived in Stamford for 15 years and likes it.
One of the few empty shops is No 11, formerly the Halifax, still bearing a plaque celebrating its restoration in 1982. Café Black at No 21 occupies a jazzy Georgian stone building of 1732 with chunky rustication round the windows and giant fluted pilasters each side. It was owned by an upholsterer, Thomas Snow, and his wife, Elizabeth, in 1792. In the 1970s, it was Westmoreland's, selling washing machines.
The public library a little farther on is a surprise. It has Tuscan columns and deep eaves to the pediment above, like Inigo Jones's St Paul's in Covent Garden. But it was designed as the entrance to the shambles (butchers' stalls). When built, in 1804, the front was open. In 1906, a wall and windows enclosed it to house the library. It is now Grade II listed, as is the telephone box beside it.
I spent a happy day looking at the High Street buildings. There have been losses. The medieval house at No 47, where the celebrated Daniel Lambert died in 1809, weighing 52 stone, was demolished in 1966.
Pevsner says that No 41 'faces down the High Street and is fully conscious of it', adding, 'It is mid-Georgian.' But it isn't; it's a 1909 rebuild for the Co-op, based on the stone building there before. Pevsner complained of the horrible Co-op shopfront, and today the Marks & Spencer posters of fruit and veg distract from the mellow stonework. It's the most central supermarket, with Waitrose, Lidl, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Aldi farther out.
Old roofs here are of stone slates, and an early 18th-century house at No 31 shows them off well, on a steep gabled roof. The shop below is Costa Coffee. Stamford shops are not allowed to display electrically illuminated fascia boards.
In 1936, the Norman castle mound was flattened for a bus station, and in 1976, the surrounding bailey was built over with a small housing development – which received an architectural award. A worse horror was turning St Michael's Church in the High Street into shops in 1982, 'an unsympathetic use and an appalling conversion,' says Pevsner on our behalf.
I walked back to the station relieved that Stamford continues to thrive because people like living in its historical streets and (partly thanks to its proximity to London) have the resources to maintain them.
