The Form & Growth of the City

The Exeter area has been occupied for as much as a quarter of a million years; there is evidence of more-or-less continuous occupation in the area since the last Ice Age.

The city owes its foundation to the Roman army, who built a fortress where the centre of the modern city now stands, joined by a road to Topsham, where there was a fort and other occupation, perhaps indicating a supply base or port. Other Roman roads ran through Heavitree towards the coast of Devon, and from Sidwell Street to Whipton, although their precise courses are uncertain.

After the army left South-West England, the site of their fortress became a town. Nearly all the buildings were within the defences, but there were small suburbs. In addition to the evidence for late Roman settlement at Topsham, a scatter of Roman finds in the suburbs of modern Exeter reflects some form of occupation - presumably farms.

During the Dark Ages settlement had shrunk to a small community in Cathedral Close and had lost the typical features of urban places. The revival of town life in the late Saxon and Norman periods was marked by settlement largely within the walled area but suburbs were already developing by the 10th and 11th centuries. By the late 14th century as much as a third of the city’s population lived outside the walls - especially the poor.

From the 1580s a fine series of historic maps allows the city’s growth to be followed more exactly. Much of the growth of the population in Tudor and early Stuart Exeter was accommodated by denser settlement within the city walls, but the greater expansion of the boom years of the late 17th and early 18th centuries saw a spread of houses into the suburbs of St David’s, St Sidwell’s and St Thomas.

Even in the early 19th century, however, a high proportion of citizens lived within a few minutes’ walk of the heart of the city. The spread of population into the suburbs accelerated in the 1820s and 30s, with (for example, the growth of St Leonards) and in the late 19th century with the building of houses in Newtown, St Thomas, Pennsylvania and beyond.

The still more rapid changes of the twentieth century can be followed in maps. Some of the principal factors behind the growth of the city are outlined. The modernisation of the centre of the city is recorded in the series of planners’ models held in the museum collections.