Chester facts to impress your family

They were guarding Chester roughly a thousand years before the abbey that became the cathedral was founded.

English Heritage records it as the largest. Built in the late first century, it had already been derelict, revived and abandoned again centuries before the cathedral's story began.

It is the only shrine of its kind in Britain still standing in its original spot, in Edgar's Field just over the river.

No. 39 stands over part of a 2nd-century bath house, with an undercroft of around 1300 inside a Victorian building above. Three eras in one shop.

A Roman quay wall, probably from the 2nd century, still edges the Roodee. Ships once moored where horses now run.

Earl Hugh refounded St Werburgh's as a Benedictine abbey just 22 years later, in 1092. That abbey became the cathedral.

Hugh Lupus had it built to power the abbey's mills, and it is still shaping the river today.

The cathedral's north transept of the 1090s is Chester's oldest standing church fabric, but the Falcon Inn runs it close, with stonework and roof timbers from around 1180.

Its oldest fabric dates from around 1208, three minutes' walk from the Falcon's. Two pubs, both older than most English cathedrals' naves.

The stone Row frontage on Bridge Street dates from around 1200 and it is still a shop today.

The Kaleyard Gate was cut through the walls around 1275, by Edward I's permission, so the monks could reach their vegetable garden.

The city contracted mason John of Helpston to build it, making it one of the best-dated medieval buildings in Chester. It guarded a river that has since silted away.

Built in 1363, it was probably an anchorite's cell, home to someone who had chosen never to leave.

The present bridge was funded by his Letters Patent of 1387, and the paperwork survives.

They stood on Northgate Street some two centuries before Chester's last great timber town house was built.

Traditionally founded in 689, St John the Baptist's became the seat of the bishop in 1075 and held it until around 1100.

It appears in records by around 1080 as the established church of the market area, and it is still there at the centre of everything.

The oldest surviving arches, from the mid-13th century, are at 28 to 34 Watergate Street. Nobody has found another city that built its shops like this.

Cowper House keeps a 13th-century vaulted undercroft, the Crypt Building and the Old Crypt sit on stonework of around 1300, and Leche House hides a 14th-century one.

King Charles Tower, Thimbleby's Tower, once called Wolf's Tower, and Barnaby's Tower all probably date from the 1200s.

The official record corrects the often-repeated date. It was built for Sir Peter Warburton.

The Earl of Shrewsbury built it in 1664, when brick was already taking over. Lady Mary Calveley's brick mansion of 1676, later the Oddfellows Hall, stands just up the same street.

Mayor Henry Gee gave the meeting its documented start, which is why the racecourse can claim four and a half centuries of racing.

The Lower Bridge Street house likely dates from 1603, the year Elizabeth I died. The Boot Inn's upper storeys are mid-17th century, over an altered medieval undercroft.

Morgan's Mount was a 1640s gun emplacement, and King Charles Tower needed repairs in 1658 after siege damage.

St Peter's east end and south side were rebuilt between 1637 and 1640, bringing galleries to a Chester church for the first time.

Bishop Stratford founded the charity school in 1700; the building is a generation older than the bishops' own Old Palace on The Groves, finished in 1751.

The Eastgate came first in 1768 to 1769, paid for by Lord Grosvenor. Joseph Turner's Bridgegate followed in 1781 to 1782 and the Watergate in 1788, by which time the river port it once served had silted away.

It was designed by the Greek Revival architect Thomas Harrison.

Between 1702 and 1708 the medieval drum tower by the Bridgegate was converted for the new walkway, and Pemberton's Parlour was built as a gazebo on the site of another. Walking the walls has been a pastime ever since.

From Row level up it is a grand town house of 1700; below, the medieval stonework carries on regardless.

The Eastgate arch went up in 1768 to 1769, but John Douglas's wrought-iron clock only joined it in 1899, marking Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee. They are 130 years apart.

That is the quiet terrace where Enjoy the Pause stands, inside the Roman walls yet nearly 1,800 years younger than them.

Its twin towers were built to cope with motor traffic, making it the baby of Chester's wall gates.

It opened in 1965, closer in age to the 1938 Newgate than most visitors would guess.

The cinema building was reborn as Chester's theatre, cinema and library in 2017. The new Chester Market opened in Exchange Square on 8 November 2022.

Thomas Harrison designed it in 1824 and it was built between 1827 and 1833, his great single arch over the Dee.

The elegant footbridge that lights up the river at night began as a Victorian original.

Grosvenor Park was laid out from 1867 to 1874, Holy Trinity Church, now the Guildhall, went up from 1865 to 1869, and Viscount Combermere rode onto his plinth in 1865.

The early-17th-century rebuild, over medieval undercrofts, was heavily restored in the 1890s by T. M. Lockwood, who also designed the Grosvenor Museum of 1885 to 1886.

You pass them before you have finished your coffee, and the cathedral is a still-gentle seven or eight minutes through the Rows.

The 1664 Bear and Billet is about a four-minute walk, with the Falcon and its 850-year-old stonework two minutes further up the hill.

The Newgate is three minutes away, the Eastgate Clock about five, and even the Watergate on the far, port-facing side of the old city is only about fifteen.