As Thomas Hughes asked in his Stranger's Handbook to Chester, published in 1856:
What think you, in the first place, of our own noble STATION with its elegant iron roof of sixty feet span, and
its thirteen miles of railway line? Twenty years ago, the ground it stands upon, and indeed the neighbourhood around,
were but plain kitchen-gardens and uninteresting fields. But a marvellous change has been effected since then,
and, as if by enchantment, suburban Flookersbrook has now become the very life's-blood of the city.
Throughout Britain, the locomotives of the new railway systems were making it possible for business men to move
around at four times the speed and with less than half the discomfort they would have experienced on the old stage
coaches.
In Cheshire and Lancashire the network of railways quickly became unusually intricate. The original undertaking
of building the line from Warrington to Birmingham in 1837 led to the extension of the line to Chester in 1840.
A line from Chester to Birkenhead, planned at the same time, never actually reached the Mersey, as there was a
clause in the Act of Incorporation which stipulated that branch lines must be built to all the ferries if to any
at all, and this was dearly impossible. So, after 1846, when the North Wales coast line was opened, the various
railway companies serving the area were busily engaged in carrying people through Chester to Prestatyn, Rhyl, Colwyn
Bay and Conway, and on from there to Holyhead for Ireland. The railway brought prosperous farmers and their wives
to the city, too, from the rich Vale of Clwyd, along the splendid Denbigh - to - Caerwys - to - Chester branch
line (on which the passengers' chant was alleged to be " We hope and Long to get to Mold "). Tradesmen,
shoppers and sightseers converged on the city from all sides. Chester started to burst at the seams.
With the enlargement of the city there were, inevitably, certain changes in the existing structure.
Early in the century during the horse-drawn-vehicle age - the increasing congestion of the centre of the city had
forced the civic authorities to remove the medieval court house or Pentice, with its accessories the stocks and
the pillory, where, as Thomas Hughes observed, the Mayor and Magistrates of the old regime had sat to administer
justice with the one hand and feed on turtle with the other. "A lean alderman was as great a curiosity in
those days," Hughes commented drily, "as a fat parish pauper would be deemed in the present.
