Forget sleeping policemen in Old Portsmouth '“ simply build a town hall
It would be the perfect traffic calming solution in High Street.
Why not build a town hall on top of a covered market area – in the middle of the road?
What? I hear you cry, it’s been tried before? How clever.
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Hide AdAnd what happened? They pulled it down in 1837 because... it got in the way of the traffic, albeit horse-drawn.
The illustration on the right is Gosport artist Martin Snape’s take on what High Street would have looked like on a market day in 1739.
He lived from 1852 until 1930 so could only guess what it would have been like, but I suspect he captured the atmosphere and the architecture fairly accurately.
You can see the Dolphin Tavern on the right of the market house/town hall so you can get your bearings. As now, it was opposite the cathedral.