Bewdley’s street names are not decoration. Almost every one of them is a piece of working information left behind by the people who used the streets, and once you know what they mean the town reads differently. Here is what the main ones are telling you.
Load Street
The wide main street running up from the bridge is the one everybody asks about. There are two explanations and they have never quite been settled. One traces it to lode, an old word for a ferry crossing or a watercourse, which would date the name to before there was any bridge here. The other, and the one most people in Bewdley will give you, is simply that this was where the boats were loaded and unloaded, the street running straight down to the quay so that goods could be moved between river and packhorse with the least possible effort.
Either way the street was built for trade, and its width is the proof. It was laid out generously to hold open air markets and to take the traffic of a busy inland port. For centuries the middle of it was not empty at all: the barley market, the shambles where the butchers had their stalls, and the butter cross together formed a long range of timber buildings running down the centre of the road. They were pulled down in 1783. Fifteen years later Thomas Telford put his new bridge slightly upstream of the old one so that it lined up squarely with the bottom of Load Street, which meant buying and demolishing the houses in the way.
High Street
In most English towns the High Street is the principal shopping street. In Bewdley it is not, and it never was. The name is purely geographical. High Street sits high up the hill, safely above the reach of the river, which in a town that floods is a distinction worth having. Load Street did the commercial work down at water level while High Street stayed dry.
Welch Gate
Welch Gate takes its name from a real gate. Wooden gatehouses were put up around the town in the middle of the fifteenth century to control who came in and, more to the point, to make sure that merchants paid what they owed. This was the gate on the road heading west towards Wales, and the Welsh trade was the reason it mattered: packhorse trains came in from the Welsh hills with wool and cattle and went back loaded with goods brought up the Severn.
Dog Lane
Dog Lane also had a gate, recorded alongside Welch Gate as one of the points where tolls were collected. Where the name itself comes from is a genuine gap. We have not found a reliable explanation for the dog, and rather than repeat a guess, it seems better to say so and keep looking.
Lax Lane
Lax is the Norse word for a salmon, and the German Lachs is its cousin. The lane runs the length of the Snuff Mill Brook, now culverted out of sight, down to the old salmon ford which was very probably how people crossed the Severn here before any bridge was built. So the name records two things at once: what was caught in the river, and where you could get across it.
Salmon were once so plentiful in the Severn that a story is often told of Worcestershire apprentices whose indentures forbade masters from feeding them salmon more than twice a week. No such indenture has ever actually been produced, so treat that one as folklore, but the price tells its own story. In November 1703 a Stourbridge account book records five pounds of Bewdley salmon bought for two shillings and eightpence.
Severnside North and South
The plainest names in town, and the most literal. These are the quays, running along the river on either side of the bridge, where the trows tied up and the warehouses stood. What is now a riverside walk lined with pubs and houses was the working edge of an inland port.
Wyre Hill
Wyre Hill is worth walking up for the name alone. Tradition holds that the original settlement was not down by the water at all but up here, at a distance from the Severn, and the evidence is still standing. An ancient inn on the hill, formerly the Shoulder of Mutton, was known within living memory of the Victorians as the Old Town Hall, and it had a projecting upper storey carried on pillars with a covered market underneath. Edward I granted a market every Wednesday and a fair on St Margaret’s day, and this may well be where they were held. The main road ran past it until 1753.
This matters for a reason beyond the name. The Guildhall on Load Street, which is part of Bewdley Museum, is frequently and wrongly called the Town Hall. The Town Hall was up here.
Three streets, and the rest
When John Leland came through about 1539 he thought the town had only three streets worth mentioning: one running north to south along the bank of the Severn, one that was the market place, “a fayre large thinge and well builded”, and a third running north to south along the hillside. That is Severnside, Load Street and High Street, and it is a fair description of Bewdley’s bones even now. Everything else, Lower Park with its almshouses and its Friends Meeting House, Park Lane, Stourport Road over in Wribbenhall, has grown around those three.