The High Street, or Salisbury High Street, is right in the middle of Salisbury.
It runs from St Thomas’s Square1 in the north to The Close in the south.
Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith.
Origin of the ‘High Street’
The word ‘High’ in this context, in Old English meant ‘grand’ or ‘important’, as in ‘high sheriff’, ‘High Court’ or perhaps ‘High Tea’.
According to Michael Quinion’s World Wide Words website the phrase ‘High Street’ came into use about 1000 years ago2.
Michael Quinion writes that:
Very early on, high began to be applied to main roads. The first example is highway, recorded from the early ninth century. This referred to a main road between two towns or cities, one that was under the special protection of the monarch as an essential communications link (hence the later phrase the king’s highway to refer to such important roads).
Around the year 1000 high street started to be used in the sense of a substantial thoroughfare, whether in country or town . As medieval towns often grew up (or were deliberately created) alongside such main routes in order to provide lodgings and otherwise tap the possibilities for trade presented by passers-by, the name High Street in time became the name of urban roads containing shops, and hence the main retail centre of a town.
It seems to me that there are two overlapping ideas here.
The first is that ‘High Street’ was the road which was the ‘main road’ into or through town. It was where ‘the Kings Highway‘ passed through the city. It became important because of the traffic passing along it, and because of the trade that the traffic attracted.
The second idea is that the street was ‘high’ or ‘of some consequence’ for other reason – that the street was grand or important in itself.
Salisbury High Street’s gone west
This is interesting in the Salisbury context because the High Street has ‘moved’.
The original High Street ran along what is now Endless Street, Catherine Street and Exeter Street. It led from the north of the city to the Ayleswade Bridge, which was an important river crossing. This High Street was very much the ‘Kings Highway’ passing through the town. The Victoria County History says that:
The High Street included the way along Drakehall Street (said in 1396 to be part of the High Street), (fn. 2) the present St. John’s Street, Catherine Street, Queen Street, and Endless Street (said in 1348 to be part of the High Street). (fn. 3) It appears that the High Street was intended to be the chief thoroughfare through the city in the 13th century, especially after the building of the bridge to Harnham at its south end. (fn. 4)
The present High Street however goes nowhere. It doesn’t lead into or out of Salisbury. It is perhaps an example of a road that is ‘of consequence’ – it has the city’s oldest church at one end and the Cathedral at the other.
Reproduced courtesy of Francis Frith
The High Street as a Metaphor
I’ve never been over-keen on the jargon around language. I could never see the point of the distinction between a simile and a metaphor, for example – perhaps my writing would be better if I could.
I do, though, like the idea of the metonym, which I discovered in researching this piece. A metonym is similar to a metaphor in the sense that one thing is standing for something else, but a metonym is something that has become part of the language. I think a metaphor only exists in its context – a metonym is common usage3.
Wordnet’s definition of a metonym is:
* S: (n) metonym (a word that denotes one thing but refers to a related thing) “Washington is a metonym for the United States government”; “plastic is a metonym for credit card”4
Wikipedia has a list of metonyms here, which is worth a browse if you’re interested. Other common metonyms are: Whitehall, Fleet Street and the Pentagon.
‘The High Street’ is clearly a metonym for, broadly, ‘the shops’. Perhaps you could go further to say that it refers particularly to mainstream, mass-market shops – ‘High Street’ is used in contrast to ‘specialist’ – for example in ‘High Street fashion’.
High Street UK vs Main Street USA
An American equivalent to ‘the High Street’ is ‘Main Street’. However, I think the emphasis is perhaps slightly different. Main Street has a more ‘social’ connotations.
My impression is that ‘Main Street’ is bound up with an American idea of traditional but shared values. Wikipedia says that it’s ‘part of the iconography of American life’5‘. It’s used in reference to ‘retailing and socializing6.
In the U.S. ‘Main Street’ is something to be preserved and something to be proud of. ‘Main Street USA’ is the entrance to Disneyland – the name conjures up fun and community.
If an English theme park was to have a ‘High Street UK’ it would probably seem slightly tawdry – it would be all about retail.
I’m not sure why these two terms do (to me at least) have these different shades of meaning. Perhaps it is because more American shopping is done in malls rather than in town centres.
Footnotes
- I think that the road signs do spell it as Saint Thomas’s Square. My feeling is that the ‘s’ after the apostrophe is out of place, but I may be wrong [↩]
- World Wide Words: High Street [↩]
- A similar concept to the metonym is the synedoche. The difference between the two as far as I can make out is that a synedoche has to be a part of the thing that it’s representing – so using ‘head’ to mean ‘person’ would be a synedoche. Personally, I’m not sure how useful the distinction is [↩]
- WordNet Search – 3.0 [↩]
- Main Street – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [↩]
- My italics [↩]
