Quay Street in Worcester was once home to smugglers inns and smuggling dens

THE Romans established a simple mooring point below the early settlement that would become Worcester. This allowed an iron smelting industry to develop and in turn brought people to the area to trade.

As trade grew on the Severn, a new quayside was created. This started life as nothing more than a site on the riverbank, where boats could beach and moor together waiting for the rise of the next tide.

A walled quayside was eventually created and today we call the area South Quay.

A maze of narrow lanes ran down to the river from the High Street. However, by the medieval period, a new road was created to allow wagons, carts and pack animals to move with ease between the quay and the city centre.

The Quay Street sign is a spruce affair these days

This was the birth of Quay Street, also seen in old documents as Keyen, Cain or Key-Street.

Quay Street became an area with good quality merchant’s houses at the top of the street and then humble inns, warehouses, cheap lodging houses, storage buildings and in some cases illegal hovels for the very poor at the bottom.

When we look at documents from the 19th century, we can see trades ranging from coal merchants, fishermen, barge builders and maltsters.

A huge number living in Quay Street would have been watermen and boatmen, who helped Worcester to thrive as a port on the Severn.

The area was also filled with inns that were often referred to as smugglers inns and smuggling dens.

Legends also mention secret tunnels that ran up to the High Street – tunnels that have so far eluded both historians and archaeologists alike.

The Severn Trow was one of the more popular pubs in the area and described as a ‘well-frequented public-house’ when it came up for sale.

However in 1906 the Chief Constable described it as ‘structurally deficient… sanitary conditions inadequate’. This was down to the fact that it was an old building that stood in the damp air of the riverside.

The St Andrew’s Institute, formerly known as The St Andrew’s Parish Club for Men and Boys and prior to that, The Wherry public house

The Wherry or Old Wherry stood on the corner of Quay Street and Copenhagen Street and was well established as a smuggler’s inn and waterman’s pub, with timbers that dated back to the medieval period.

Unfortunately a fire reduced its three storeys to two.

The Wherry, like many of the drinking establishments in the area was known for its violent and drink-fuelled brawls, illegal lock-ins and a place where the police could sometimes be paid to look the other way.

Numerous ‘unfortunates’ also walked the dimly lit streets, waiting for their customers.

Some of the inns were used by the city coroner, who inspected the bodies of people dragged out of the Severn.

These people often fell into the river late at night or were killed further upstream whilst working on the river.

The Health Report compiled by Sir Charles Hastings in 1832 described how the nearby Church of All Saints stood above Quay Street and helped the area deteriorate further.

The graveyard of the church sat above the houses and when it rained heavily ‘putrid matter oozed through the walls’.

Rats were also common in the area, which led to people killing the vermin and claiming money on the rats’ tails handed in at the Guildhall – a popular activity with children!

The St Andrew’s Institute site as it is today

In the 1920s Cannon Philpott, the Rector from St Andrew’s Church took on The Wherry and turned it into The St Andrew’s Parish Club for Men and Boys.

Some improvements had been made to the area, but it was all too little and too late.

The city’s importance as a port slowly waned and as the housing of Quay Street fell further into disrepair the city council was forced to make a decision to remove the slums and move an entire community to the high ground outside the city.

This brought many people to the new housing of Ronkswood, Brickfields and Tolladine.