The New Town - John Speed's map of Denbigh, 1610

Description

The New Town
A survey of 1334 mentions a borough of Denbigh inside the walls as well as a merchant's town outside the walls. However, the town as we know it today probably developed from the early sixteenth century, after Jasper Tudor, the Earl of Pembroke, had burnt Denbigh town and besieged its castle in 1468 at the end of the Wars of the Roses. Indeed, John Leyland writing in the 1530s stated that the new town has been 'clere defacid with fier'. He also commented that the present town of Denbigh,
'hath beene made of later time, and set much more to commoditie of cariage and water by many welles in it. And the encrease of this was the decaay of the other' (walled town).
The castle was surrendered to Parliament at the end of the Civil War and partly dismantled in 1660.
Much of this new town is shown on the John Speed Map of 1610, including the encroachment, between High Street and Back Row, on to the Market Square. Most of these streets exist today and contain a number of Denbigh's earliest surviving domestic buildings dating from the mid-sixteenth century and seventeenth century period. They also include a number of good-quality, mid-late eighteenth century town houses in Vale Street.