Bristol began as Brycgstow, “the place at the bridge”, a Saxon town on a low ridge above the River Avon. Four streets met at its centre: High Street running down to the bridge, Wine Street to the east, Corn Street to the west, and Broad Street running north, downhill to a gate in the town wall. They met at the High Cross, and their crossroads, by Christ Church, is still the heart of the Old City.
Before the Exchange was built on Corn Street in the eighteenth century, merchants set up their stalls in Broad Street to trade. Its name is simple description: it was the widest of the four.
Long plots and many owners
Roger Leech’s survey of the property records for the old town shows Broad Street as a row of long, narrow plots on each side, each running back from the street to a lane behind. The east side backed onto Tower Lane, the west onto Small Street. Plots were split, joined, leased and bequeathed again and again, and the same names turn up for generations.
No. 53, near No. 51, was probably the house in Broad Street granted to St Augustine’s Abbey in the middle of the twelfth century by Robert Fitzharding, the founder of the abbey that is now Bristol Cathedral. The abbey’s records say it was the house in which he first lived. In 1435 No. 52, next door to No. 51, was the home of William Chiltenham, a barber, and belonged to the chapel of St John the Evangelist. After the chapels were dissolved it was granted by the Crown, in 1548, to Hugh and Miles Partridge.