Tanning is not a trade that leaves handsome buildings behind. It leaves pits in the ground, and in Bewdley they are still being found.
Anyone digging in the area around the Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Gardens has a fair chance of turning up tanning pits, and builders have done so repeatedly. That ground, laid out as gardens in 1978, had been used since medieval times for gardens, brickyards and tanneries, which is the reason the town centre keeps its handsome Georgian face while its industrial past sits underneath the flowerbeds.
Why here
Tanning needs three things in quantity, and Bewdley had all of them. It needs hides, which came from the butchers whose stalls filled the middle of Load Street. It needs water, and the Severn and the brooks running down to it supplied that. Most of all it needs oak bark, because the tannin that turns raw skin into durable leather is drawn out of bark steeped in water, and the Wyre Forest sat on the town’s doorstep producing more of it than anywhere nearby.
The scale was considerable. During the Tudor period Bewdley is believed to have had as many as twelve tanneries working at once, in a town of a few thousand people. Tanned leather appears consistently in the lists of what went downriver from the quay, alongside timber, horn and caps, so this was not a trade serving the town alone but one producing for export.
The work itself
It was foul work and everyone knew it. Hides were soaked, limed to loosen the hair, scraped, and then laid down in pits between layers of crushed oak bark and left in liquor for months, sometimes more than a year, before they were leather. The smell was famous and the trade was usually pushed to the edge of a settlement or downwind of it, which is part of why the tanneries clustered where they did rather than on the main streets.
The related trades followed the leather. Glovers, saddlers, parchment makers and shoemakers all appear in the parish registers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, working the material the tanners produced. Bewdley was not just tanning hides, it was making things out of them.
The end of it
Tanning outlasted the river trade by more than a century. The last of Bewdley’s tanneries is recorded as closing in 1928, which means there were people alive in the town within the last few decades who could remember the smell of it.
Nothing much is left to look at. The gardens are pleasant, the buildings that once housed the trade have gone or been converted past recognition, and the only reliable evidence surfaces when somebody puts a spade in the ground. For an industry that ran here for four hundred years, that is a thin memorial, but it is a real one.