A five-hour fire in 1694 gave medieval Warwick its elegant Georgian face
On 5 September 1694 a blaze tore through Warwick, destroying 460 buildings in about five hours and leaving 250 families homeless. The rebuilding, designed to lure gentry and professionals, produced the handsome 18th-century streets that sit beneath one of England's most famous castles.
Warwick is the county town of Warwickshire, on the River Avon about 9 miles south of Coventry. People have lived on its hilltop since the Neolithic: excavations found more than 30 shallow pits with early flints and pottery, left by farmers sometime between 4000 and 2351 BC. The footings of a large 2nd-century Roman barn turned up beneath Warwick School in 2017 and 2018. Its Old English name, Wæringwīc, may come from a clan name, a word for fortification, or a weir across the Avon.
In 914, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Æthelflæd, Lady of the Mercians and daughter of Alfred the Great, built a fortified burh on the hilltop, one of ten raised against the Vikings; a sandstone outcrop by the river made it easy to defend. Warwick soon became a shire town, and under Æthelstan it gained a royal mint that operated until the mid-12th century. Danes burned much of the town in 1016. William the Conqueror founded the castle in 1068 on his way north to crush a rebellion, knocking down four houses to make room.
Medieval Warwick thrived as an administrative and military centre rather than a trading hub, ruled mostly by Beauchamp earls from within its walls; the east and west gatehouses still stand. During the Civil War the castle held out for Parliament through a two-week Royalist siege in 1642, as the attackers lacked guns heavy enough to breach it. Castle Hill Baptist Church, founded in the mid-17th century, is among the oldest Baptist congregations anywhere.
After the fire, architects including Francis Smith and later William and David Hiorne reshaped the centre, and Daniel Defoe admired the result. The blaze gutted much of St Mary's church but spared the Beauchamp Chapel, built from 1443 to 1464 for Richard Beauchamp, whose gilded copper effigy was cast in 1459. A single-arch sandstone Castle Bridge opened in 1793, canals arrived in 1800, and the railway in 1852, though express trains stopped at neighbouring Leamington Spa, and Warwick largely escaped the Industrial Revolution.
Source: Warwick
