A glance at the pages of the 1871 census of the Plymouth area is
enough to indicate the scale of the changes which took place in Devon in
the middle years of the 19th century. People who could see no future for
themselves or their children in the villages gravitated to the
one large conurbation in the County - not yet a single town, not yet a
city, but an exciting and developing place, reaching out from the
Dockyard, enveloping the surrounding countryside and bursting with
opportunities for anyone who was prepared to work.
Over the past four years, we've heard from family members who have
visited Plymouth to try to find and, perhaps, photograph the streets
where their ancestors lived. Visitors from overseas sometimes think of
England as the "old country" - a kind of museum where nothing
changes much over the years. Nowhere is this less true than in Plymouth
which suffered some of the most devastating bombing experienced anywhere
in the UK during the Second World War. Although rebuilding began in 1947, it was many years before
the centre of the city took on any semblance of normality; a personal
memory is of a vista of flattened rubble which seemed to go on for
miles, broken only by ruined churches and rows of small, single storey, temporary shops lining the edges of what had
previously been the principal streets.
The thinking behind the rebuilding of Plymouth was that it would be a
brand new city, built in a modern idiom. There would be no more slums or
substandard housing in the city centre but, for the sake of history,
many of the old street names would be preserved and re-allocated as near as
possible to their original positions in the new street layouts to
be created in the central areas.
