Chester Almshouses

Today I had about 45 minutes to spare after taking my mum into Chester and decided to choose a specific location and see if I could get a half decent blip. I quite like this approach because it forces me to think a bit more about the composition. 

I chose the almshouses and this blip is taken looking down from the city walls. The row of cottages is known as the Nine Houses, although only six have survived, and they date from around 1650. They are the only pre-19th century almshouses in the city and are unusual in Chester because the bottom storey is constructed of brick on a sandstone plinth with timber framing on the upper storey. Most of the ground floors of old buildings away from the Rows have timber-frames directly on sandstone. 

They were saved from collapse and restored and modernised at the end of the 1960s. It's pity this didn't happen to more buildings at the time.

Traffic on the street and the fact that it was bin day restricted the viewpoint from ground level and even from the city walls it was hard to find a viewpoint because of the trees. In the end this was my favourite one although I tried several with a shallower depth of field but this didn't quite work.

I wondered what the S.O.P and S.M.P plaques signified and discovered that it is a parish boundary separating St Olave's and St Michael's churches.