The History of Durham's High Street and Historic Shopping Streets

Long before Durham was a university city or a World Heritage Site, it was a market town, and the shape of that trading past is still written into its streets. The compact tangle of lanes that climbs towards the cathedral peninsula was laid out for buying and selling, and to walk from the Market Place down Silver Street or up Saddler Street today is to follow routes that shopkeepers, packhorses and market-goers have used for the best part of a thousand years. Here is a guide to the history of Durham's high street and the historic shopping streets around it.

The Market Place: the heart of it all

The Market Place has been the focal point of Durham for as long as records survive, with trading here documented from at least the eleventh century. It is the hub from which the old streets radiate: Silver Street heads west towards Framwellgate Bridge, Saddler Street climbs east towards the cathedral and castle, Claypath runs north, and the modern High Street leads south. For centuries this open square was where produce, livestock and goods changed hands, watched over by the Church of St Nicholas, whose present building dates from 1858, and by the Guildhall, parts of which go back to the medieval period.

The square you see today owes much to the Victorians, who reshaped it in the mid-nineteenth century, and to a careful restoration of its paving completed in 1976. Statues of Neptune and the third Marquess of Londonderry still preside over the space, and a general outdoor market continues to trade here alongside the seasonal fairs and events that keep the medieval tradition alive.

Best for: Best for understanding how the whole city grew around a single trading square.

Silver Street and Saddler Street: the medieval spines

The names of Durham's oldest streets are a directory of vanished trades. Silver Street is thought to recall the silversmiths who once worked here, or a former mint from the days of the Prince Bishops, and it remains a busy shopping run dropping down towards Framwellgate Bridge. Saddler Street, climbing the other way, was once known as Saddlergate, while its lower reaches carried the blunter name of Fleshergate, the butchers' row, from the old word for a flesh-hewer.

These are not tidy Georgian parades but narrow, curving medieval streets, their frontages following property lines set out centuries ago. Where Saddler Street forked near Magdalen Steps, one branch dropped towards Elvet Bridge and was known as Souter Peth, the shoemakers' way. Today the same steep, cobbled lanes are lined with independent shops, cafes and long-established businesses, which is exactly what makes them worth exploring on foot rather than by car.

Best for: Best for browsing independent shops along Durham's genuine medieval streets.

The Victorian Market Hall

By the middle of the nineteenth century Durham's growing town wanted a proper covered market, and in May 1851 Parliament passed the Durham Markets Company Act, which set up a company to build new market places, abolish the old corn tolls and regulate the city's markets and fairs. The scheme was driven forward by the mayor, William Henderson, a Durham businessman, and the buildings were designed by the London architect Philip Charles Hardwick. The Durham Market Hall was built between 1849 and 1851 and opened in December 1852, with the neighbouring Town Hall rising alongside it in the same years and to the same hand.

The site chosen was itself steeped in history: the hall stands on the ground of New Place, the medieval and Tudor town house of the Nevilles, Earls of Westmorland, who forfeited the property to the Crown after the failed Rising of the North in 1569. Extensively refurbished in the 1990s to allow six-days-a-week trading, the hall still does the job it was built for, its handsome ironwork interior now filled with independent stallholders selling food, crafts, gifts and specialist goods. It is one of the best-surviving Victorian market halls in the North East and a direct link to the retail city of the 1850s.

Best for: Best for a covered market that has traded on the same spot since 1852.

Elvet Bridge and the streets beyond

The shopping city was never confined to the peninsula. Elvet Bridge, built in the twelfth century by Bishop Hugh du Puiset to link the Market Place with the Elvet side of the river, drew trade and traffic across the Wear and once carried shops and chapels on its very structure. Its arches and the lanes around it still shape how people move through this part of the city, and the bridge remains one of the most characterful approaches to the old core.

Together these streets tell a single story. The steep medieval pattern that funnels everything towards the Market Place, the trade names buried in Silver Street and Fleshergate, the confident Victorian statement of the Market Hall and Town Hall, and the independent shops that fill them now are all chapters of the same long history of Durham as a place to trade.

Shopping the historic city today

The pleasure of Durham's old streets is that the history is not behind glass; it is where you buy your bread and your books. Start in the Market Place, drop into the Durham Market Hall for its independent traders, then wander down Silver Street and back up Saddler Street to feel the medieval grain of the city underfoot. It is a high street quite unlike a modern shopping centre, and all the better for it.

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