The Shape of a Powys Town

Stand at the crossroads of any Powys town and look at the plan rather than the buildings. There are only three patterns here and each one records a decision by somebody.

Planted

A lord or a king decided there would be a town, and it was laid out at once, next to a castle, and settled with burgesses who paid rent for a plot.

The signature is regularity. A grid or a single wide street with side lanes at intervals. Long narrow plots running back from the frontage at right angles — burgage plots, rented by the foot of frontage, which is why they are narrow and deep. A market place, either a widening of the main street or a rectangular space.

Montgomery is the clearest example in Wales. Laid out from 1223 below the new stone castle, with a grid still legible in the streets and the town walls partly surviving.

New Radnor is the other one, and it is more informative because it failed. The grid is there, pegged out below the castle mound, and much of it was never built on. You can walk the streets of a medieval town that did not happen.

Knighton, Builth and Hay all began as planted boroughs at castle gates, though later growth has softened the plan.

Grown

No plan. A church, a crossing, a market that established itself, and building along whatever roads were already there.

The signature is irregularity. Curving streets that follow contours or old field boundaries. A triangular open space where three routes met, which is what a market place looks like when nobody laid one out. Plot boundaries of every different width. A church at the centre, often in a curving churchyard that predates everything round it.

Llanidloes is a hybrid worth studying: a planned crossroads with the market hall at the centre, grown outward irregularly.

Machynlleth is a long wide market street that is essentially one enormous linear market place with everything hung off it.

Most Powys villages are grown, and many are so dispersed that there is no village at all, only a church and a scatter of farms. In Radnorshire that is the normal pattern rather than the exception.

Invented

The third category is nineteenth century and there is really only one full example.

Llandrindod Wells was built from almost nothing between the 1860s and 1914 to receive spa visitors the railway delivered. It has wide straight streets, deliberate vistas, a formal park, and hotels several storeys taller than anything else in the county.

Nothing about it grew. It was speculatively built, all at once, by people expecting a market that lasted about fifty years.

Newtown was invented twice: once as a medieval plantation, and again from the late 1960s when the Mid Wales Development Corporation set out to roughly double its population with industrial estates and housing. The join between the two is very visible.

What to look for

Burgage plots survive as property boundaries long after the buildings change. Look at the pattern of back gardens and yards on a large-scale map, or from an upstairs window.

The market place, and whether anything has been built in the middle of it. Infill in a market place — an island of buildings — usually means permanent stalls that became permanent shops, often in the seventeenth or eighteenth century.

Where the church is. Central means the town grew round it. Off to one side means the town was planted next to an existing settlement.

Back lanes running parallel behind the main frontages, which planted towns almost always have and grown towns almost never do.

The first edition Ordnance Survey, free through the National Library of Scotland, which shows every plot boundary before twentieth-century redevelopment removed them.