Finding Hay: A Journey up Broad Street

 I was given a review copy of this new book by Rosie Hayles, published by Logaston Press - and I've really enjoyed reading it.

Rosie Hayles was one of the first booksellers I met in Hay who wasn't Richard Booth (I moved here to work for Richard).  At that time, she was running her bookshop at West House, and I bought one of the first books I got in Hay from her - The Flowers of Adonis by Rosemary Sutcliff, about the Athenian general Alkibiades.

She begins with the Normans, and the castle, and ends with Richard Booth creating a Booktown, coming right up to date.

She has taken for her focus the history of Broad Street, which she first came to in 1986, though she mentions other parts of Hay as well.  Over the centuries, it's been the route for invading English armies, the site of the cattle market, and there have been pubs and mills and garages and grocers' shops along its length (and an undertakers, and a gas showroom, and more).  

The tramway and railway ran between Broad Street and the river, and the gas works was at the lower end, which involves the business dealings of solicitor James Spencer of the Hay Railway Company in the nineteenth century. 

Another solicitor, Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong, had his office on Broad Street - the only solicitor to be hanged in British history.  Martin Beales, the solicitor who later used those same offices, and lived in Armstrong's house on Cusop Dingle, wrote a book arguing that he should not have been convicted, and there have been other books about the case.  

The road to the bridge over the River Wye runs between two historic pubs, the Black Swan and the Three Tuns (one now a holiday cottage and the other still a pub/restaurant) to one side.

She mentions several people I've known - I used to drink occasionally in the Three Tuns when it was run by the legendary Lucy Powell (and I have a friend who would always bring his own beer mug because he didn't trust her standards of cleanliness!), and I remember Bryan Wigington having his antiques at the chapel which has now become the Globe.

There were lots of details I didn't know, though - for instance the house where I live now was once the home of a baker called Potty Watkins!  And she has a lot of detail about the Cafe Royal (now Broad Street Book Centre and Rest for the Tyred) and the Hitchcox family who owned it.

I was also intrigued about the area where the Clock Tower now stands - which was once called The Tump.  When I first came to Hay with my husband, we were still thinking of ourselves as archaeologists, and when we looked at the local OS map for the distribution of prehistoric sites, we noticed a gap where Hay is.  We assumed that, if a prehistoric site had been here, it was probably the sacred grove of Hay's Welsh name, Y Gelli Gandryll - but maybe the tump was a prehistoric burial mound?  Whatever the truth, it is long gone now.

This is a great addition to the books of local history about Hay, and I heartily recommend it!

[Edited to add: now available in the Hay Festival Bookshop, and Broad Street Book Centre!]