The Rows
About
Chester's real architectural signature and the reason the city is worth a special trip rather than a stop on the way to somewhere else. The Rows are covered shopping galleries at first-floor level, running above street-level shops along all four streets that radiate from the old market Cross: Eastgate, Northgate, Watergate and Bridge Street. Shops sit both up on the timber-fronted gallery and down in stone undercrofts below, a two-tier arrangement first recorded by name in 1293 and reaching something close to its full extent by around 1350, with roughly twenty genuine medieval stone undercrofts still surviving beneath the later shopfronts. Nothing on this scale survives anywhere else in England. It costs nothing to walk them and there is no set route: cross from street level to gallery level at any of the frequent staircases and work your way along, in and out of the covered sections, for as long as the shops hold your attention.
Photos
Highlights
- ✓Continuous covered galleries at first-floor level along Eastgate, Watergate, Northgate and Bridge Street
- ✓Around twenty surviving stone undercrofts from the 13th and 14th centuries beneath later shopfronts
- ✓Independent shops, cafes and restaurants at both street and gallery level
- ✓No equivalent structure anywhere else in England at this scale
Tips
- →Look up: the two-tier structure is easy to miss if you only look at shop windows at street level.
- →The galleries stay dry and several degrees cooler than the open street, useful on a wet or hot day.
- →Pedestrianised 08:00-18:00 daily, so the streets themselves are easy walking without traffic.
Best Season
More Attraction Activities
Chester Cathedral
A working cathedral with over a thousand years of history, on the site of an Anglo-Saxon minster, just inside the walls near Eastgate.
Chester Zoo
A large, conservation-focused zoo a few miles north of central Chester. Book online ahead; open daily except Christmas Day and Boxing Day.
Grosvenor Museum
Chester's Roman history museum, with a strong tombstone and inscription collection from Deva Victrix. Free entry.