- Historic Wells-next-the-Sea
Ask any visitor to Wells where the hub of the town is, and they will surely say the Quay, the place to buy buckets and spades, go crabbing, and eat fish and chips looking out at the boats and the birds. But this was not always the case.
To find the original centre of the town you have to turn your back on the Quay, walk up Staithe Street, cross over Station Road and find the narrow lane called High Street. But you won’t find a Boots or a Tescos down this High Street. Only the ghosts of former shops, with their wooden window frames, brightly painted. Walk further, and you’ll come across Church Plain, flanked by the church. Now we’re getting warmer.
If you carry on down the footpath alongside the churchyard, you’ll see a green field to your left. Try to imagine a creek running through it, dotted with boats, pungent with the smell of fish and mud, ringing with the voices of fishermen. That’s what it was like in medieval times. When the church was built it was at the very heart of the village, next to a harbour that has vanished.
Before 1660 high tides would bring the sea up over the marshes almost to the feet of the church. But the creek silted up, embankments were built, new channels created, and the marshes were drained for sheep to graze on. Gradually, the face of the village turned to look at the sea.
Numerous narrow lanes, or ‘yards’ developed – Jickling’s, Red Lion, Tunn’s and Lugger – to join the new Quay to the old town, running between the maltings, warehouses and higgledy-piggeldy cottages of the fishermen, and the grander houses of the merchants. Shops sprung up along Staithe Street to serve the growing population, and the High Street, left behind, settled into comfortable obscurity.
In fact, Wells-next-the-Sea is remarkable for its lack of national shop chains or standardised high street branding. Instead, the town supports a wide range of independent businesses working from behind picturesque historic shop fronts. Something worth preserving.
