A view of Newport's quay with the Dolphin in the foreground.  To the right, Mew's brewery maltings building stands prominent with their barge moored by the slipway.

      Turning to the other streets on Speed’s map and working from west to east across the town, it can be seen that the upper part of the present High Street from St James Square to the beginning of Carisbrooke Road was known as Castlehold.  This dates back to the period when Newport’s town charter did not cover that area and its jurisdiction remained under the Island governors based at Carisbrooke castle.
      Mill street was first called West Lane and then Horsemongers Lane, Lugley Street has already been spoken of, as has Crocker Street.     South Street was originally a boundary of the early town but was then named Cosham Street after the manor of the Cosham family.  The manor house itself stood at the corner of Church Litten and South Street where the current Safeway Supermarket is sited.  It was, apparently a rambling Elizabethan structure with the usual associated stories of secret passages and societies.  It was pulled down in 1851.
       Sea Street was divided by Quay Street and the western half between it and Holyrood Street was known as “Shispoole Street”.  Scarrots Lane had a number of names including Beadmans Lane and Quakers Lane.  Trafalgar Road had the grisly name of Deadmans Lane after the ambush and slaughter of French soldiers who invaded and burnt the fledgling town in 1377.  The ambush took place roughly  between where present Melbourne Street and Nelson Street join Trafalgar Road.  Newport men under the command of Sir Hugh Tyrrel won the day.  The bodies or “noddies” (local dialect) were dragged to a burial mound close to the present Church Litten graveyard and over the years, noddies hill was corrupted to Node Hill.

 

William White's map of Newport dated approximately 1601 on which Speed was to base his later street map.

   In 1861 the Newport Paving Committee began to rename many of the towns streets.  Victorian propriety was to supersede the vulgar medieval origin of Newport’s street names. The final changes were; Deadmans Lane to Trafalgar Road, the Corn Market to St.Thomas’s Square, Horsemongers Lane to Mill Street, Russell Street to Orchard Street and Node Hill to Upper St. James Street. As mentioned, the early boundaries of the town were marked by streets named after the points of the compass. The High Street was the primary east to west axis, occupied by the town houses of the wealthy and larger traders, with hotels rather than public houses and access to the three main squares where commerce took place.
    St James Street was the town’s main north/south axis and was the workshop of the community, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, builders, coopers, saddlers, tinsmiths and masons inhabited this street.  If there was something to be made or repaired, it was in this street.
Thirsty work, slaked by its nineteen public houses along its length.
    South Street was definitely “down market”.  Just three hundred yards in length, it housed all that was undesirable to the upper echelons of Newport Society.  Here were the slaughterhouses, candle makers, malt houses and marine suppliers.  Crowded on the north side of the street and living between, or over and behind these workshops were the labouring classes.  Here were the small enclosed yards surrounded by tiny houses with a central water pump where a lack of sanitation compounded the pitiful squalor.
    Between the lower part of South Street and Pyle Street existed the maze of yards and passageways where Valentine Grey, the little chimney sweep, died his miserable death.  Five hundred people lived   in these two up, two down hovels which were clustered in courts.  At the upper end, opposite the present Bus Station, was the street’s largest yard, the Tontine, which contained twenty-two homes, and survived well into the 20th century.  Arranged around three sides of the yard and sharing a communal toilet and water supply, it shared the area with the public house of the same name.  The little sketch below by Paul Jordan give an idea of what it must have looked like.

    Across South Street, on the left side of the entrance to Orchard Street was the Millwright Arms.  Again, this was a large public house catering to the needs of a small community clustered tightly around it.  In the adjacent area currently occupied by the Tourist Office, public conveniences and carpark outside the Lord Louis Library, sat this large public house and 27 dwellings.  Church Litten and Town Lane were narrow passageways barely the width of a cart.
    Moving further long South Street to the east, roughly where Associated Tyre Services now stands, was the Valiant Soldier public house.  Beside it were a row of tiny houses facing the street and interspersed between them, passages leading into courts.  These courts consisted of two rows of cottages facing each other across a paved area.  As with the Tontine, sanitation consisted of a water tap or pump and tiny brick toilet.  There were six courts between number 50 and 62 South Street, of which Bull Court was the most densely populated.
   One hundred and seventy-four people lived in this little area plus a malthouse and carriage store.  None of these buildings were more than two storeys high and the majority in the courts were one-up and one-down.  For many of these inhabitants of Newport, life was a never ending daily grind to make a living and the day to day poverty was rarely alleviated by charity.   The town was also a market for a predominately rural population and not forgetting, the centre for rest and recreation for a large military presence on the Isle of Wight.

 

Looking west across the bus station site before reconstruction in the early 1960's

In fact, Newport, for long periods of its history and due to the island’s geographical location, was a garrison town.  Soldiers, military police and patrols were an everyday sight on Newport’s streets.  Many of the public houses were to echo this military connection with their names
    By the nineteenth century, population pressure on the medieval town was causing it to grow.   To the east, Barton village was born.  Eldridge, in his “Newport in Bygone Days” suggests that it was named after a developer of the same name but the name appears to have older roots.   A “barton” was an untenanted manor farm run for the benefit of the manor alone.  The name crops up in other areas of the Island.
   To the south, a development of suburban streets was constructed over the meadows leading to Shide.  In the west, New Street and West Street began the spread of dwellings towards Carisbrooke and to the north, Parkhurst and Albany barracks drew houses and pubs to their gates.

 

Looking north along Holyrood Street towards the Maltings and the Railway Medina, the railway yard features with the River Medina stretching away towards Cowes.

In the 20th century Newport has continued to grow but these earlier developments have either been destroyed or have lost their public houses.
   Coppins Bridge as a community has largely gone, unfortunately short term road developments have seen to that.  Barton village has been absorbed into Pan Estate and the old inns that catered to the soldiers between the barracks and the town have also gone, as have the stopping places on the road to  Carisbrooke.
   The original town is still there, despite the developers, but the pubs have largely gone.  Each one was a focal point for groups within Newport’s community of townsfolk and each was an integral part of the town’s social fabric.
 Their loss is our loss, and as the memory of them fades, so does our awareness of our past and of ourselves as part of the town’s continuing existence.    Newport has lost much of its distinctiveness as an Island town by their going; and as  large national chain stores and supermarkets claim the town’s streets, stamping them with their corporate identity as they have done with other provincial centres, there is less left to differentiate our Island town from its mainland counterparts.

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