The Victoria pub is located on Watergate Street in the centre of Chester.
The Victoria has been a pub since 1269 and is a Grade II listed building.
The Grade II listed description given by British Listed Buildings reads as follows;
"SJ4066SE WATERGATE STREET AND ROW
595-1/4/405 (North side)
28/07/55 Nos.2 & 4 Street and Nos.2 & 4 Row
(Victoria Public House)
(Formerly Listed as:
WATERGATE STREET
Nos 2-10 (even) Street & Nos 2-8
(even) Row incl. Victoria Hotel &
Deva Hotel)
GV II
2 undercrofts and town houses, now 2 shops in undercrofts and
Victoria Public House on Row and upper storeys. Undercrofts
probably of medieval origin with some stonework visible; C17
timber-framed upper structure clad in brown brickwork early
C19; rendered to rear; grey slate roof; with ridge parallel
with road over front portion.
EXTERIOR: 4 storeys including street and Row levels. Altered
painted stone piers at each end through street and Row levels.
Modern shopfronts to street, of no character. A pair of
slender Tuscan columns support the dentilled bressumer over
the Row front; plain square-section iron railings; the public
house frontage behind the Row walk is rebuilt, with white
render and varnished woodwork. Rear passage, west, to St
Peter's Church Yard. Windows to third and fourth storeys
replaced in existing openings by tripartite small-pane metal
casements, 2 per storey and narrower on fourth than third
storey. A rear chimney.
The rear has a full-width gable with later additions; features
are altered or hidden by render.
INTERIOR: the structure of the undercrofts is concealed except
for a short length of sandstone rubble wall; the dimensions,
4.01 x 12.84m and 4.28 x 12.62m, suggest medieval origin. At
Row level one uncut beam and altered joists are exposed over
the central bar. There is a corner fireplace in the rear
corner of the west front room and an adjoining altered chimney
breast in the rear corner of the front east room, probably
c1720; a dogleg stair in a timber-framed stairwell adjoins
each side wall, visible between the third and fourth storeys.
(Chester Rows Research Project: Brown AN & Grenville JC &
Turner RC: Watergate Street: Chester: 1988-: 31).
Listing NGR: SJ4051466293"
SOURCE: (
visit link)
A report about The Victoria by Jonathan Blackburn appeared on Cheshire Live on the 26th February 2023 and reads as follows;
'Inside Cheshire's oldest pub built over a church crypt and a graveyard'"The Victoria on Watergate Row occupies a site that first became a pub 754 years ago
A pub like The Victoria could only be found in Chester. The Victoria and the nearby Boot Inn on Eastgate Row may well be unique, being set above the street on Chester's famous Rows.
The Victoria is particularly prominent, looking out from Watergate Row and down on Chester Cross, where the city's four main streets - Eastgate, Watergate, Northgate and Bridge Street - meet.
Buskers are almost always performing at the Cross, and music drifts up to the 754-year-old pub with the sounds of bustling shopping crowds and tourists in the street below.
The Chester pub shares a wall with St Peter's Church, the site of the Principia, the administrative building in Roman times. The beer cellar is built on top of the church's crypt, and to enter the pub from the opposite side to the Rows, patrons must walk over the old graveyard, a fact a sign outside the pub proudly proclaims:
The Victoria Pub is situated on the former site of the HQ for the Roman Legion based in the ancient city of Deva, and lies in close proximity to Chester High Cross, the exact centre of the old walled city.
The property first became a pub in 1269, and obtained its current name at the turn of the century in honour of the then Queen. Now a listed building, with its odd shaped doors, low roof, antique settles and oak beams (of which the main beam has been in place for 726 years and is almost 1,000 years old) it has a charm of its own, despite the cellar being positioned over St. Peter’s Church crypt and the courtyard being a flagged-over graveyard.
Inside, the pub snakes around the bar at its centre. Little alcoves feel like annexes due to the pub's unconventional layout. The barman stoops down to pass a pint through the narrow gap between the bar and the low ceiling, hanging and billowing between the beams that pin it back.
Opposite one side of the bar, tall and narrow booths made of dark mahogany and ironwork in floral patterns will fit just two people each, with a semi-circular table squeezed in between them, just big enough to stick two pints on.
From the dark booths, deep within the pub, a window can be seen out on to the Rows. The view stretches all along bustling Bridge Street, where another world basks in glorious sunshine.
The window is no bigger than any average bedroom window, but looks huge, taking up the whole wall from the top of the leather-buttoned bench to the ornate plaster mouldings on the ceiling. It’s a view that perhaps hasn’t changed all that much since Cromwell closed the pubs just shy of 400 years ago.
Regulars talk across the tables in front of the window, enjoying soup, pies and other hot meals that fly out of the kitchen. One man takes a quick lunch, standing at the bar, while others enjoy theirs at their leisure in the small parlour to the rear of the pub, divided from the bar by a few steps and set around a tiled fireplace with a heavy iron grate.
It has the kind of features and atmosphere that many pubs, especially in trendy city centres, have lost. For all the beauty and history in its architecture, a plaque above the bar reminds patrons to raise a drink to a former regular, a reminder that it is people that make the pub."
SOURCE:https://www.cheshire-live.co.uk/whats-on/restaurants-bars/inside-cheshires-oldest-pub-built-26286603
(
visit link)
(
visit link)