LOOKING UP IN CHESTER

Chester is famous for the ‘Rows’

Another trip then. Not a Capital City Break, this time; not really a city-break at all, actually, though weirdly, this one does involve two great cities. Oh and I’m not adventuring on my own. This time, I’m with the Intrepids. And that adds a very different vibe to travelling.

The first city is the city of Chester. We stopped off for a few hours before finding our hotel.

Chester is small for a city, and with good reason. Nestled against the river Dee, with the hazy Clwyd mountains on the horizon, the tiny Roman fort became a garrison for soldiers, then an Anglo-Saxon stronghold, and finally a bustling walled-city in 1541. In fact it’s the only city in the UK with a ring of Roman walls surrounding its centre. You can walk along them, wide enough for three people, taking in the magnificent stone cathedral and the Victorian reproduction Tudor facades. The guide said that they were three miles long, but we didn’t go all the way round today. For some reason, the cathedral was loudly pealing all its bells at once, and we had to sit down to remind ourselves how to spell the word ‘cacophany’.

Right in the centre of Chester, where the Roman soldiers would have entered ‘Deva Victrix’ under a huge arched gate, is the Eastgate Clock, England’s second most-photographed timepiece. Apparently, it was added to the gate to celebrate Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee in 1899.

Britain’s secondmost frequently photographed clock

Chester’s a compact place: small and elegant like Bath or Ely, but a lot flatter than either of those places. It carries that medieval feel with its black and white timbered buildings looming over pedestrians, casting shadows across the street. I always think that style of architecture, even the idealised victorian type, is just like an old ship - beams of black painted oak and bright white plaster, tiny, ancient windows that only roughly fit between the wood, and bulging galleys hanging over walkways secured by ornately carved wood.

They call this the Rows, and if you look up in Chester, you’ll see it everywhere. Just above the fancy-shop-line, cloister-like passages under four-hundred-year-old second storeys, cool from the shade and sheltered from the rain. If you look up.

I quickly realised that Chester just makes you do that in a way that not many other cities do - look up. As I was taking photographs around the city, I realised that all the shots I wanted to capture, had me angling my phone at a forty-five degree angle, way above the bustling pedestrians and the glimmering shops of the Twenty-First Century. In places like Chester, time-travel is easy if you just look up. I think it might be because the streets are relatively narrow, so you find yourself constantly angling upwards to see something interesting, because you can’t quite take it all in.

Chester Cathedral

But also, I think it might be something to do with the feel of the place. Like Cardiff, Chester is young and studenty, almost as though ‘Hollyoaks’ (which is set here) has acted as some sort of magnet. Every other couple that passed us seemed sort of young and impossibly cool - from bearded hipster to party-girl, there was a lot of show. But, unlike the Welsh capital, here, I didn’t feel excluded or intimidated by that at all. In fact, I felt quite safe and confident walking through the tide of tanned and toned teenagers. It might have been of course, that the youngsters were balanced out by some older grey-haired northerners, who, actually, anywhere in the world, seem to know how to make a place feel friendly.

There is an optimism then. Like a lot of former industrial cities in the North, the stone and the brickwork is darkened by a hundred years of factory smoke, but also, like many cities, Chester seems to glisten with a bit of hope too. Between the ancient black-and-white-fronted beamed windows and the undercrofts that many of those old buildings had built into their medieval basements, there is no shortage of ground-floor, modern, fancy, and attractive shop-windows. Boutiques, gelaterias, wine bars, swirly restaurants and bistros with parasols and wicker chairs out front, and the inevitable trendy chains that are everywhere these days. Like the contrast of black and white timber and plaster, Chester combines the old and the new very well, and very tidily.

We walked round in about two hours. No museums with the Intrepids - they’re very much, ‘what’s around the corner’ people, which can be a little frustrating, but plenty of architecture to see. And I get the feeling that there are a few places we didn’t have time to visit today.

I definitely think I would come back. There’s an elegance to the mixture of things that make Chester what it is. But like a lot of things in this world, I suspect you only get to see it by looking up.