Victorian Wareham

From Praying…

By the middle of the 19th century, out of the four churches left in Wareham, three of them reflected the rising diversion from the Established church, with ‘Independent’, ‘Unitarian’ and ‘Wesleyan’ chapels, alongside the old Anglican Lady St Mary church.

St Martin’s in the Walls, Dorset’s oldest church, hadn’t been used as a place of worship since 1736, although there is evidence that it continued to be used for christenings and marriages. In fact, after it’s use as a shelter for the homeless victims of the Great Fire in 1762, it was abandoned and therefore escaped the questionable zeal of the Victorian architects who loved to refurbish and rebuild Britain’s oldest churches. This unfortunately wasn’t the case for Lady St Mary’s. Despite its pedigree of having been rebuilt around 900 by Alfred the Great’s daughter, the venerable old church suffered the demolition of its Saxon nave in 1842.

There were two other medieval churches that had disappeared or fallen into disuse by the Victorian era – All Saints church near the South Bridge, St Peter’s where the Town Hall now stands, and St Michael’s which has totally disappeared.

To Paying…

In 1865 there were some 161 businesses listed in Wareham. Wareham was a fair reflection of a Britain whose ordinary citizens were becoming relatively prosperous compared to a few decades earlier.

The town had 15 pubs, of which only the Duke of Wellington on East Street, the Horse and Groom on St John’s Hill, the New Inn on the Quay, the Antelope on West Street, and the King’s Arms on North Street now survive. There were 3 hotels (including the Red Lion and the Black Bear which still serve guests), 12 shoemakers, 11 grocers, 7 bakers, 5 butchers, 4 drapers and a hairdresser! There was a general outdoor market on Saturdays and another on Tuesday for the sale of corn that was held in the Corn Exchange, which occupied the ground floor of the Town Hall. So for those that had money there was certainly a great deal of choice in where and how to spend it.

Another important industry in 19th century Wareham was the making of beer, with 2 breweries, one called Bennetts on Abbots’ Quay, and the other was a well established brewery called Panton & Co. located in Pound Lane. Panton’s (along with its other site in Swanage) served around 90 public houses, but declined toward the end of the 19th century, and by 1922 the Wareham site was only used for storage.

To get a feel for what Wareham would have been like at the turn of the century read the excerpt about Wareham in the book “Highways and Byways in Dorset” by Frederick Treves, published in 1906.