Victoria Road, Dartmouth
Victoria Road, Dartmouth
In the recent history of the chaos in the world financial markets, spiralling debt and huge uncertainty, we seem to be at the mercy of world markets, and bankers or politicians that we cannot see or talk to.
In the early 19th century Dartmouth was in similar turmoil – but the people of the town knew who to blame – the Freemen of their own town.
Between 1804 and 1824 four of the town’s banks failed. The final one to fail was the General Bank, managed by the local well-to-do families, the Hines and the Holdsworths. It was banker to the Dartmouth Corporation, the entity which carried out all commercial work on behalf of the council.
The pressure this put on the public purse impacted greatly on the town’s people, many of whom had already been facing hard times after the end of the Napoleonic Wars which had brought many navy contracts to the town’s shipyards.
Arthur Howe Holdsworth, patriarch of the Holdsworth clan, MP for the borough (along with the marvellously named Captain John Bastard, RN) was a very public figure who could be actively sought out by angry members of the community.
He worked hard to bring about the 1815 Market Act which provided to build a Market and a Market House in a central position in the town on the reclaimed land of the Mill Pond. The Act also undertook to link the town with the new ‘Turnpike’ road between Kingsbridge and Totnes.
The roads out of town were so steep only pack ponies could get up them carrying goods – meaning the town had only really taken deliveries by sea and was cut off from the rest of the area by land. This meant when times were hard a major flow of money from the South Hams’ other towns was being stopped.
But after the passing of the act, very little happened.
In fact, no major planning for a road took place until September 1823. Suspiciously this is just before the failure of the General Bank. Cynics might say a man on the local council who also was MP and just happened to be involved in the bank, might be looking to divert attention from an impending disaster by getting a long-discussed development moving.
The corporation chose an up and coming star of British Civil Engineering – James Meadows Rendel.
Rendel was only 24 when he came to Dartmouth, but was the main engineer for the Kingsbridge to Totnes Turnpike project and was asked to take a look at how he would build a road which would allow horse and carts to get in and out of Dartmouth.
The engineer was, later in his career, to design the Harbour Walls at Brixham and Torquay the Laira Bridge in Plymouth and build Bowcombe Bridge near Kingsbridge. He designed a number of the railway schemes later completed by Isambard Kingdom Brunel and became a master of using the new technology of hydraulics in construction. He was a man of consummate skill and great vision. The company he founded still runs as High-Point Rendel.
He showed his vision by suggesting to the town elders that they build a straight road from Townstal down towards the Coombe Mud sweeping round to join the town on the front by the New Ground, almost exactly where College Way is now.
This idea required too much investment, so they chose his other suggested route for a road – building up existing tracks to have a road which followed the contours of the hills above the town towards the newly reclaimed land of the Mill Pool. He wanted to build up the whole area to avoid future problems with flooding, but was defeated by a lack of funds.
The first section of the road to be built was a short piece, only a few yards long, to connect Duke Street to the incoming road from the hill in 1824. This was ‘overseen’ by Arthur Howe Holdsworth, and even though it was a tiny piece of the massive job of building the road, it seems to have allowed the loud and overconfident politician to claim he had engineered the whole thing.
The Mill Pool was not completely drained at this point, so culverts – or drainage channels, were used to funnel water away from the area. These were a compromise due to cost and time, because in extreme weather, Rendel knew these would not stop flooding. and they didn’t.
The building continued apace and by 1826 the New Road – which was to be renamed Victoria Road when the Queen celebrated her Jubilee – was opened.
This helped the flow of commerce into the town. The Market buildings were completed in 1828, meaning one market could be held, rather than spread across the town as it had been up to then. A boon for business, and a welcome addition to the land available for development, the new road and draining of the Mill Pool helped the economy of the town.
But Arthur Howe Holdsworth, who had helped to bring the road about as a way of saving his own political skin and social standing, found the town’s people not as forgiving as he might have hoped. In 1836, after the Reform Act had opened up voting to more common folk than ever before – he found himself voted off the council – and was never voted back in.
First published October 2011 By the Dart