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Towcester Tenements
A Survey of the Victorian Town
by Philip Riden & Margaret Webb
This booklet brings together work done by an evening class organised by the Northamptonshire Victoria County History Trust, which worked on several sources for the nineteenth-century history and topography of the small market town of Towcester, which stands on Watling Street at its junction with the main Northampton–Oxford road. In particular, it uses a rating assessment of 1855 and the 1910 'Domesday Book' to produce an outline history of every house, shop, pub and other building in the town as it existed a century ago, with brief details of owners and occupiers, and in some cases a description of the existing property.
The detailed notes on each street are prefaced by a general account of the topography of Towcester from medieval times to the present day. The project was intended to establish a basic gazetteer of tenements as a framework into which further information about the houses at an earlier date can be fitted, as work by VCH on the history of the town progresses. As it stands, the survey presented here should be of great interest to local residents, to family historians whose ancestors lived in Towcester, and to local historians keen to pursue similar studies of other towns.
