This chapter sets out on a walk through Chester's streets, before going on to explore the historical management and representation of the city's medieval built heritage, and then moving into a broader discussion of questions of authority, legitimacy, and licence in historical scholarship, and how we might conduct engaged research which defies the threat of various “monsters.”

Walking through Chester's History

We begin our walk outside the south porch of Chester's great medieval cathedral, today dedicated to Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary, but, in the Middle Ages, the Benedictine abbey of the city's patron saint, St. Werburgh. Beneath the red sandstone walls of the south aisle and south transept, we move through the cathedral grounds, past the city war memorial, completed in 1922 in a Gothic style which echoes its medieval surroundings, and out through a wrought-iron gate onto the pavement. Following the curve of St. Werburgh's Street, with its ornate half-timbered buildings and smart boutiques, we turn onto Eastgate Street, where a view of Chester's famous “Rows” stretches out before us. Here we jostle with crowds of shoppers, street entertainers, and buskers, and, perhaps, horserace-goers stepping out of the glossy Grosvenor Hotel in sharp suits and flamboyant hats. Today, as always, we’ll also step aside for tour groups and visitors clutching brochures and cameras, as they follow their guide's uplifted umbrella or study their tourist maps, and take in the prospect of Chester's rich and evocative built heritage.

Perhaps the most iconic feature of the city's surviving medieval fabric, the Rows of Chester run along the four main streets, where the terraced, mostly half-timbered buildings incorporate galleried public walkways at first-floor level, run-ning largely continuously along the length of the streets. Today, these galleries give access to shop fronts at this upper level, while the undercroft space below would originally have been used for storage and later, certainly by the sixteenth century, as workshops, taverns, and further shops.