The Black & White Picture Place

Details from John McGahey's View of Chester from a Balloon 1855:

4. The River Dee & St. John's Church

This detail from John McGahey's wonderful aerial view of Chester in 1855 is the section of the original illustration closest to where his balloon was tethered above the eastern suburbs of the city- probably near the junction of Hoole Lane and Boughton. We can see the River Dee and two of its crossings: at the top is the Old Dee Bridge- built around about the year 1387, on the site of a succession of earlier wooden bridges and a pre-Roman fording place- and downstream is the original Queen's Park Suspension Bridge, which was built in 1852- just three years before this drawing was made- to join the city to the affluent suburb of Queen's Park, then being developed across the river. The bridge was rebuilt in 1923, and is with us still- indeed, it underwent a thorough restoration in 2002. You can see a photograph of the original bridge here. The open meadow at the bottom of the picture would later be transformed into Grosvenor Park and above it the great West Tower of the unique and beautiful Church of St. John the Baptist dominates this quarter of the city, as it had done for hundreds of years. The Saxon church that stood here was founded by King Aethelred of Mercia in about the year 689, and the great Norman cathedral that replaced it was never completed and subsequently suffered from a series of disastrous collapses of towers- indeed the last of them, the West Tower shown in the illustration, was itself to fall in 1881, twenty six years after McGahey drew it. We can see that the church at this time was surrounded by hundreds of gravestones, all of which have since been removed. At the bottom of the picture, on the edge of the meadow, may be seen the now-demolished Cholmondeley House. Learn more about this and the stirring events that took place there in the St. John's Church chapters of our Chester Virtual Stroll.. Between St. John's and the city walls may be seen a wooded, elliptical area of land with a couple of large Georgian houses at each side. These are St. John's House to the right and Dee House to the left and between them, unbeknown to the citizens of that day and long after, lay the buried remains of a great Roman amphitheatre which was built here by the Legions soon after the establishment of the fortress of Deva itself, sometime in the late 70s AD. It was only rediscovered in 1929 and has almost continually since been the subject of controversial (to put it mildly) planning decisions, as you will discover in some detail here. As in the Grosvenor Bridge enlargement from McGahey's aerial view over the city, note the almost total lack of houses on the far bank of the river at this time. Other enlarged sections from McGahey's wonderful illustration: The Old Port Grosvenor Bridge The Kaleyards The Northgate The Cathedral

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