Introduction to High Street

HIGH STREET  based on the original Abergavenny Local History Society  Survey 1980.

This runs from the medieval north gate to the crossing of Flannel Street and Market Street.  The east side still shows burgage pattern, but almost certainly the “wedge” behind the west side which includes St John’s Church building, now used as a Masonic Hall, suggests an early market site. It first appears as a street in the C14 Lord of Abergavenny records.

The name, High Street, comes from the Norman custom of raising their roadways on an embankment above or higher than the surrounding land. It is the commonest name for a street in the United Kingdom.

There were graves discovered in the 1960s when Woolworths built extensions on the rear of High Street, so the graveyard of St John’s may well have extended across to the other side of the High Street.

High Street is numbered 1 – 15 on the east side from Market Street to the North Gate at the beginning of Frogmore Street and returns on the west side nos. 16 – 24 from the corner of Nevill Street to St John’s Street.