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# Walking through 1750s Newport
- URL: https://www.newportcornucopia.co.uk/walking-through-1750s-newport/
- Published: 2026-10-27T17:24:26.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-27T17:54:25.000Z
- Description: What you could see and who you could encounter on a stroll through 1750s Newport from Stow Hill, along the High Street and onto Malpas and Caerleon.
- Author: Newport Cornucopia
- Tags: Article

Before the docks, the Monmouthshire Canal, or the railway, Newport was a compact river port and market borough of fewer than a thousand souls.

Most of what we picture when we think of historic Newport belongs to the nineteenth century—the industrial boom, the Chartist uprising, and Victorian expansion. But what did the town actually look and feel like before the First Monmouthshire Turnpike Act of 1758 gated the parish roads?

To answer that, I have put together a special interactive longform project: **The Chapman’s Ellwand**.

The premise is straightforward: we follow an itinerant Scottish tally-draper named Alexander Semple across a single summer day in 1750\. Equipped with his 45-inch ash measuring rod (an ellwand), Semple walks the ancient, toll-free highway from the Rumney Bridge, looping north around the enclosed parkland of Tredegar House to Bassaleg, climbing the ridge over Stow Hill, pushing through the livestock and refuse of High Street, and detouring around the Castle and marshes towards Malpas and onto the river wharves of Caerleon.

Rather than imagining the landscape, the journey is anchored entirely to primary sources. By cross-referencing eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements against the earliest surviving survey—the c. 1750 plan of the borough—the burgage plots come alive with documented people and incidents:

- **Plot 98 & 102:** The highway robbery of attorney Peter Davies’s clerk on the open road through Bassaleg by a monoglot Welsh yeoman.
- **Plot 57:** The massive commercial malthouse leased by Mayor Thomas Dumayne on Stow Hill, wetting up to 4,000 bushels of grain a season.
- **Plot 87:** The burglary of burgess Adam Barber’s house down Skinner Street, revealing an extraordinary hoard of stolen paduasoy silk gowns and cambric aprons brought down from Brecon by the Caerleon carrier.
- **Plot 92:** The brazen theft of Elizabeth Nicholas’s galled pack-mare straight from her front door at the corner of Griffin Lane.
- **Plot 108:** A high-stakes four-day cockfighting main at the King’s Head between the gentlemen of Monmouthshire and Glamorganshire.
- **Plot 81:** Attorney Thomas Phillips, confidential agent to Tredegar, managing gentry leases and later summoning magistrates to the King’s Head as Clerk to the Turnpike Trust.
- **Plot 5:** County magistrate Charles Van of Llanwern losing his prized pointer and spaniels to dog-thieves on the Castle approach.
- **Plot 28:** Cordwainer John Frost hunting for an absconded apprentice in —documenting the Frost family's shoemaking workshop in that exact lane more than three decades before his grandson, the Chartist leader, was born there.

![](https://www.newportcornucopia.co.uk/content/images/2026/10/Kings-Head-1750.jpg)

The project features a dedicated reading interface, full archival clippings and transcriptions, interactive route waypoints comparing the 1750 terrain to modern landmarks, a pannable high-resolution viewer for the 1750 plan, and a searchable gazetteer of all 113 surveyed plots.

View the full article — [https://1750.newportcornucopia.co.uk/](https://1750.newportcornucopia.co.uk/?ref=newportcornucopia.co.uk)

I’d love to hear your thoughts, corrections, or any further eighteenth-century references you might have tucked away.

![](https://www.newportcornucopia.co.uk/content/images/2025/01/image-56.png)