We have featured some of Chester's original streets over the past few weeks and now it’s time to take a look at what Watergate Street used to look like.

By the 1960s, Watergate Street had become one of the more delapidated looking streets in Chester. The City Council had been buying property with the intention of restoring them, but did not have sufficient funds to even start repairs.

The upper part of Watergate street is surprisingly narrow, but this does help disguise the few modern buildings that have crept in along The Rows over the years, particularly in the 1960’s.

Nikolaus Pevsner and Edward Hubbard, wrote in the early 1970s, that Watergate Street is ‘now the quietest and least commercialized of the main streets in Chester.’