Stratford-upon-Avon

• 1. Introduction

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  Stratford-upon-Avon has a permanent population of 30,495 people. It receives approximately 2.7 million visitors a year. That gap between residents and visitors defines modern life in this Warwickshire market town. The cause is not hard to find. William Shakespeare was born here in 1564 and was buried here too. His name draws crowds from every part of the world. Yet Stratford was already nearly four centuries old when he arrived. The deeper questions concern what the place was before he was born, and what survived the long shadow of the English language's most celebrated playwright.

• 2. A Town Built to Order

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  John of Coutances, lord of the manor, laid out a grid of new streets in Stratford in 1196. His scheme gave tenants the right to rent plots of roughly 0.25 acre apiece and pass them to their heirs. That arrangement, known as burgage tenure, attracted merchants and tradespeople from across the region. In the same year, King Richard I granted the town a charter allowing a weekly market. Those two documents together gave Stratford its formal status as a market town.

  The settlement at Tiddington, about a mile northeast of the modern town center, shows archaeological evidence of Roman occupation from the 1st to the 5th century AD. A monastery may have been founded at Stratford as early as the late 7th century, when Oftfor, bishop of Worcester from 691 to 693, preached to the local Hwicca tribe. The rights of the bishops of Worcester to the land were confirmed by Offa in 781. That monastery was likely destroyed by Viking invaders in 1015.

  By 1252, Stratford had grown to approximately 240 burgages, plus shops, stalls, and other buildings. The tradespeople who settled there formed the Guild of the Holy Cross, which became the town's main institution of local government. The Guild built a chapel in the 13th century and a Guildhall and almshouses on Church Street in around 1417.

  For much of its early history, the only river crossing into Stratford was a wooden bridge first mentioned in records from 1235. John Leland, the antiquarian, called it "a poor bridge of timber and no causeway to it." He noted that many traders refused to cross when the Avon rose and that those who tried "stood in jeopardy of life." In 1484, Hugh Clopton, a wealthy local man who later became Lord Mayor of London, paid for a masonry arch bridge to replace it. Clopton Bridge made commerce far more reliable and gave passing travellers a reason to stay in the town.

  When the Guild of the Holy Cross was abolished in 1547 under King Edward VI, the town's inhabitants petitioned for a new borough charter. They received it in 1553, which allowed them to form a new Town Council.

• 3. The House on Henley Street

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  John Shakespeare arrived in Stratford in 1551, having moved from the nearby village of Snitterfield. Originally a farmer, he became a successful glover and businessman and eventually an official on the Town Council. In 1556, he purchased a large half-timbered dwelling on Henley Street. Eight years later, in 1564, his son William was born in that house.

  The property stayed in Shakespeare hands until 1670, when William's granddaughter Elizabeth Barnard died without children. She left the estate to Thomas Hart, Shakespeare's great-nephew. Following John Shakespeare's death in 1601, the main house had already become a tenanted inn called the Maidenhead, later renamed the Swan and Maidenhead. Hart family members continued living in a smaller adjoining cottage throughout that period.

  At the end of the 19th century, Edward Gibbs renovated the building to restore it closer to its original Tudor form. The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust now cares for five properties connected to Shakespeare's life in and around the town. Hall's Croft was the home of Shakespeare's daughter Susanna and her husband Dr. John Hall. Nash's House stands alongside the site of New Place, the property Shakespeare owned when he died. Anne Hathaway's Cottage, the home of Shakespeare's wife's family, is in Shottery. Mary Arden's House, his mother's family home, is in the village of Wilmcote.

  King Edward VI School, on the corner of Church Street and Chapel Lane, is the grammar school thought to have been attended by Shakespeare. In 2016, the room where Shakespeare is believed to have studied opened to visitors for the first time.

  Each year, Stratford marks Shakespeare's birthday over two days on the weekend closest to the 26th of April, the date of his christening. Separate events in 2016 marked the 400th anniversary of his death.

• 4. Theatres of Fire and Ambition

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  In 1769, the actor David Garrick built a temporary wooden theatre in Stratford for his Shakespeare Jubilee celebrations. The theatre stood not far from the site of the present Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Two days of torrential rain brought terrible flooding and almost washed it away. Garrick's celebration contributed to what observers called Bardolatry, the organized veneration of Shakespeare that turned Stratford into a tourist destination.

  In 1864, Charles Edward Flower, whose family owned a local brewery, marked the 300th anniversary of Shakespeare's birth by erecting a temporary wooden theatre on his gardens. The Tercentenary Theatre stood for three months before being dismantled. Its timber was used for building houses. In the early 1870s, Flower gave several acres of riverside land to the local council on the condition that a permanent theatre be built. By 1879, the first Shakespeare Memorial Theatre had opened on the banks of the Avon. By the early 20th century, the actor and manager Frank Benson was effectively running it.

  In 1926, the theatre burned down. The artistic director William Bridges-Adams moved all productions to the local cinema while a new building was planned. An architectural competition produced a winning entry from Elisabeth Scott, an English architect. Her theatre was opened in 1932 by the Prince of Wales, later Edward VIII. It was the first important building in Britain designed by a woman architect.

  Sir Peter Hall was appointed artistic director designate in 1959 and formed the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1961. The RSC later created two smaller theatres alongside the main building. The Swan Theatre, built in the 1980s within the shell of the original 1879 structure, was modeled on an Elizabethan playhouse. Both the Royal Shakespeare Theatre and the Swan closed in 2007 for refurbishment and reopened in November 2010. In 2018, the RSC publicly described Stratford's rail connections as "woefully inadequate" for an international tourist destination. Only a handful of direct daily trains served London.

• 5. Trade That Moved the Town

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  The River Avon was made navigable through Stratford in 1639, by the construction of locks and weirs. In the words of Daniel Defoe, this opened "a very great Trade for Sugar, Oil, Wine, Tobacco, Iron, Lead." The goods traveled by water almost as far as Warwick. In return, corn and cheese came back from Gloucestershire and Warwickshire toward Bristol. Stratford had become a significant inland port.

  Between 1793 and 1816, the Stratford-upon-Avon Canal was built, linking the Avon at Stratford with Birmingham. By the early 19th century, canal and river wharves lined what is now Bancroft Gardens. The first railway in Warwickshire, the Stratford and Moreton Tramway, opened in 1826. It was a horse-drawn wagonway, 16 miles long, designed to carry goods between the canal and the rural districts of south Warwickshire. The tramway fell into disuse by the early 1900s and the tracks were lifted in 1918. A surviving brick arch bridge over the Avon now carries pedestrians only.

  Edward Fordham Flower opened a large canal-side brewery in Stratford in 1831. The Flower and Sons Brewery on Clopton Road survived until 1967, when Whitbread took over the company. The first steam railway to Stratford arrived in July 1859, a branch of the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway from the south. A branch from Hatton in the north followed in October 1860. Both initially had separate stations, but the two were joined at the current railway station, which opened in July 1861.

  The River Avon navigation through Stratford was abandoned in 1875, as rail had made the old waterways commercially redundant. It was restored almost a century later, in 1974, by volunteers. The manually-powered chain ferry near the Royal Shakespeare Theatre has carried passengers across the Avon since 1937. It was the last of its kind to be built in Britain.

• 6. Soldiers, Writers, and Other Lives

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  In February 1643, Royalist forces under Colonel Wagstaffe occupied Stratford-upon-Avon. The town sat at the junction of several main roads, making it valuable to both sides in the English Civil War. Parliamentarian forces under Lord Brooke recaptured it on the 25th of February, after an engagement on the nearby road to Warwick. In a separate incident that month, three barrels of gunpowder stored in Stratford's Market Hall blew up. The explosion destroyed the building on the site of what is now the Town Hall.

  In July 1643, Prince Rupert was at Stratford when Queen Henrietta Maria passed through the Midlands. She stayed as the guest of honour of Susanna Hall at New Place. Oliver Cromwell visited Stratford in December 1646 and again in 1651. He wrote a letter from the town to Lord Wharton on the 27th of August 1651, before the Battle of Worcester.

  Arthur C. Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, served with the RAF at RAF Stratford during the 1940s. He later wrote a short story called "The Curse," set in a post-apocalyptic Stratford-upon-Avon. From 1901 to 1924, the novelist Marie Corelli, whose real name was Minnie Mackay, lived at Mason's Croft on Church Street with her companion Miss Vyver. The novelist and playwright J. B. Priestley, born in 1894, died in Stratford in 1984.

  Gordon Ramsay moved to Stratford with his family in 1976, when he was nine years old. John Profumo, later Secretary of State for War, served as the Member of Parliament for Stratford-upon-Avon from 1950 to 1963.

  Since 2008, Stratford has hosted a literary festival held twice a year: one event in spring and a shorter gathering in autumn. Its speakers have included Jeremy Paxman, Michael Palin, Jeffrey Archer, and Alastair Campbell.

  The Freedom of the Town was awarded to both Sir Kenneth Branagh and Dame Judi Dench on the 22nd of April 2022.