A market on Watling Street
Atherstone developed beside Watling Street, about a mile west of the Roman fort at Mancetter. That distinction matters: the nearby military site and the later town are separate places. The town also stood close to a packhorse route linking Bristol and Lincoln, placing its market within a wider network of travel. [2]
Hugh, Earl of Chester, gave Atherstone to the Abbey of Bec in Normandy in 1100. Its abbot became lord of the manor, obtained a market charter and laid out burgage plots around the marketplace to attract tenants. These long plots formed a framework that later trades and housing would occupy much more intensively. [2]
A friary church shared with a school
St Mary’s links the marketplace with a different history of institutional reuse. The religious house was refounded for Augustinian friars in 1378, and the church retains a medieval chancel and octagonal tower. The upper part of the tower was rebuilt in 1782, while the nave, aisles and parts of the transepts date from 1849. [6]
After the Dissolution, the nave became a chapel for the town and the chancel housed the grammar school. Education and worship occupied different parts of the former friary church. The school stopped using the chancel in 1863; after a period of dereliction it was restored to church use in 1888. The sequence reveals how an old religious building could accommodate changing community needs. [6] [3]
From tanning to felt hats
Watercourses descending from the wooded land of Arden south of the town supported tanning. Felt hatmaking later displaced it and took over the watercourses, reusing the supply of soft water. Accounts place the beginnings of the hat trade in the sixteenth or seventeenth century, so its development is clearer than a precise founding date. [2] [5]
Hatters initially worked individually in cottages. Later they rented communal workspace in the yards behind Long Street, in workshops known as bow-and-basin shops. Production thus expanded within domestic plots before the factory became its more visible form. By the enclosure of the open fields in 1765, most townspeople depended on trade rather than agriculture. [2]
Industry inside the burgage plots
The hat trade attracted workers from elsewhere, but neighbouring landownership constrained outward expansion. Development filled the plots behind street-front houses, creating Atherstone’s characteristic yards. By the late eighteenth century most burgage plots had been subdivided, and the pressure for housing increased their density. [2]
Factories commonly adapted buildings already standing, including a tannery and an iron foundry, rather than starting with purpose-built premises. The local house-history project records seven hat factories by 1900. This was an industrial town whose workplaces were woven into an older street pattern. [2]
Clearance and what remained
Poor-quality housing crowded the yards, and clearance began in the 1920s, continuing particularly after the Second World War. The removal of these homes changed the interior of the medieval plots even where their street-facing buildings remained. Long Street retained stretches of Georgian and Victorian frontage, while much of the marketplace survived. [2]
Further redevelopment reshaped the edges of the centre. In the late 1970s buildings to the south-east were demolished for North Warwickshire Borough Council offices and Woolpack Way was constructed. In the late 1980s the Vero & Everitt hat factory in Station Street was demolished, and the road realigned for a supermarket. These changes help explain why the historic street frontage and the spaces behind it tell different stories. [2]
Factory lives and street traditions
The Shrove Tuesday Ball Game makes Long Street a place of communal competition as well as work and shopping. Marjorie Service recalled the ball being passed around her factory for workers to sign, shop windows being boarded before play, and spectators throwing sweets from upstairs windows. The same recollection links factory work with preparations for the town carnival. [7] [8]
The game has attracted argument as well as celebration. Newspaper material preserved by Warwickshire Libraries records its first BBC broadcast in 1934, difficult play during the severe winter of 1947 and complaints about injuries and property damage. The often-repeated story of a contest in 1199 belongs to local legend; these newspaper records offer firmer dates for its more recent history. [8]
By the end of the twentieth century Atherstone’s seven factories had all closed, according to the industrial archaeology society. It identifies parts of Hatton’s works in Long Street as a rare survival. Industrial memory also remains in photographs and workers’ testimony: factory closure should not be confused with the disappearance of every trace of hatting. [5] [4]
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