Stourport-on-Severn is a mid-18th Century new town, one of the first in the UK called into being by the expansion of industry.
The River Severn upon which its sits in northern Worcestershire was an important artery for trade in Roman times and probably before. However, the key river port in the area was at Bewdley a couple of miles north, while what is now Stourport was barely a hamlet.
This changed in the years after 1768 when the Staffordshire and Worcestershire Canal, one of the Midland region’s first, reached its terminus with the River Severn at Stourport. For the first time a more or less completely artificial waterway had been constructed linking the growing industrial hubs of the western Midlands to the north with the Severn.
At Stourport’s dock the cargo carried on narrowboats from the north was loaded onto Severn trows for shipment south towards Worcester, Gloucester, Bristol and the sea, or north up to Shropshire and the metalworking, china and coal mining industries of the Ironbridge Gorge.
By 1788 John Wesley, the founder of Methodism on one of his journey’s through the area was calling Stourport “a well built village”. When he next visited two years later he claimed that it doubled in size. In truth by 1795 the population was around 1,300, whereas little over a generation before itn barely entered double figures.
Stourport’s late 18th Century prosperity was not to last. Advances in canal building technology meant that by the 1810s quicker routes from the west Midlands industrial centres had opened up, like Worcester and Birmingham. And as the 19th Century progressed the commercial and social geography of Great Britain became steadily more concentrated in the island’s centre and less dependent upon naturally occurring navigable waterways like the Severn.
This meant the Stourport stagnated, though this had the effect of meaning that many grand late 18th and early 19th warehouses and houses were retained that otherwise may have been flattened. Something which means that today it is amongst the best preserved as well as the most impressive of the UK’s former inland ports.
The town’s location right by the River Severn gave it a second lease of life throughout the 19th and 20th Centuries and into our own time as a leisure destination. One of the truest embodiments of the dictum that landlocked Midlanders will turn anywhere with water into the seaside.
To this day residents of Birmingham and the Black Country flock to Stourport-on-Severn, now an interesting little town of slightly over 20,000 residents, at weekends and on bank holidays to go on the fairgrounds, stroll along the river bank, eat fish and chips and candy floss. Some even have holiday caravans overlooking the Severn.