Kingsgate opened, by Our Own Reporter
An original newspaper report written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.
This report appeared in a local newspaper in 1878, after a town council pulled down a district of old, crowded housing to build a wide new street.
On the steps of Thurlbeck station, every morning from seven until the last train, a woman named Mrs Mossop sells pies from a tray. For thirty years she kept a cookshop in the Shambles, and if she turns her head to the left she can look down the whole length of the new street that now stands where her kitchen used to be. ‘It is a grand street,’ she told our reporter on Monday. ‘I hope the gentlemen enjoy walking on us.’
It is a grand street, and we should fail in our duty if we did not say so. Kingsgate runs as straight as a ruler from the railway station to the Market Place, a quarter of a mile in all, sixty feet wide, paved with granite setts and lit by forty lamps on iron standards. Along it stand banks, drapers, a hotel of five storeys and the new offices of the Building Society, all faced in pale stone which will not, we fear, stay pale for long in a Thurlbeck winter. The inscription on the drinking fountain at its foot calls it ‘a gift to the generations yet unborn’. It is the finest street in the county.
Those of our readers who remember what stood here three years ago will need no reminding of the change. The Shambles, as it was called, was a tangle of alleys so narrow that two persons could not pass without turning sideways, and so dark that the gas was lit at noon in winter. Fever was never absent from it. The town’s medical officer reported in 1874 that a child born in the Shambles had less than an even chance of seeing its fifth birthday. No one who knew the place will mourn it.
It would not be honest, however, to pretend that the change has been a blessing to everyone. Something above eleven hundred persons lived in the Shambles. The Corporation gave each household a month’s notice and two pounds towards its removal, and there, for the most part, its interest in them ended. Not one house has been built for them. Our reporter has found many of them crowded into the courts behind Fuller’s Row, three and four families to a house, in rooms worse than those they left and at higher rents.
Mrs Mossop is one of them. She now pays more for half a room in Fuller’s Row than she once paid for her shop and kitchen together, and she walks a mile each morning to stand on the station steps, because, she says, it is the only place left where her old neighbours still pass her.
We trust that the Corporation will consider her complaint. A town that clears away its worst houses without finding homes for those who lived in them has not cured the disease; it has only moved it to another street. In every other respect, we congratulate the town.
“The writer is entirely enthusiastic about the new street.”
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120 exam-style questions on Eduqas GCSE English Language 2.1 Section A (30%) - Reading, covering 2.1.1 Two unseen non-fiction texts, 19th and 21st century. Each one has a worked solution and a mark scheme showing where the marks go.