Chester visitor guide
Chester in the Rain
Two tiers of shops with a covered walkway in front of them. Chester was built for weather like this, seven hundred years before anyone invented the shopping centre.
Most historic cities have a wet-weather problem: the thing you came to see is outdoors, and there are four museums to spread across six hours. Chester is different, and it is worth understanding why before you write the day off.
The Rows — the double tier of shops that runs along the main streets, with a continuous covered walkway at first-floor level — mean that a large part of the historic centre is already under cover. You can move along Watergate Street, Eastgate Street and Bridge Street, in and out of shops, cafés and medieval undercrofts, and barely get wet. Nobody designed this as a rain solution, but it has been working as one since the fourteenth century.
Start with the Rows, because they are the answer
Get up into the Rows at Chester Cross and stay up there. The walkway is covered for long stretches, the shops open directly off it, and the whole thing is at first-floor level so you are looking down on the street rather than dodging along it.
Watergate Street has the best-preserved run and the most atmosphere. Bridge Street has the Three Old Arches, the earliest identified stone shopfront in England. Where a shop has left its steps open, go down into the undercroft: around twenty stone undercrofts of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries survive along the Rows, and standing in one is the closest you get to medieval Chester at street level.
More than ninety listed buildings contain sections of Row — nine of them Grade I. There is a full account on the Chester Rows, and shopping covers what is actually in them now.
The indoor list, in the order worth doing it
Chester Cathedral
The obvious answer and also the right one, because it is not one building but a complete Benedictine monastery: nave, choir, cloisters, chapter house and refectory, all connected, all indoors. You can spend two hours without repeating yourself. Find the choir stalls of about 1380 and lift the seats to see the forty-eight misericords carved underneath. The refectory does food, which solves lunch.
Chester Market
Sixty-odd stalls under an oak roof in Exchange Square, open since 8 November 2022, serving food from most of the world until ten at night from Tuesday to Saturday. Closed Mondays — worth knowing, because it is the default wet-day lunch and Monday catches people out. It is a two-minute walk from the Cross and connects into the covered Rows.
Storyhouse
A 1936 Art Deco cinema reopened in 2017 as two theatres, a boutique cinema and a library that stays open late — all in one building, for £37 million. On a wet afternoon this is the best value in the city: you can sit in a library with a drink and read, catch a film, or see a matinée, and none of it requires planning ahead.
Grosvenor Museum
Free, and the Roman tombstones alone justify the visit — named soldiers and civilians of the legionary fortress, carved with their trades. The museum opened in 1886, funded by the first Duke of Westminster to Thomas Lockwood’s design, and the period house next door at 20 Castle Street takes you room by room through the centuries. An hour, or two if it is really coming down.
Deva Roman Experience
Off Bridge Street down Pierpoint Lane: a reconstructed Roman street with the excavated remains beneath it. Indoors, compact, and much the best option if you have children who have run out of patience with churches.
Blue Planet Aquarium
Ten miles east at Ellesmere Port, and the local fallback when the rain has set in for the whole day. A walk-through tunnel and enough of a site to fill an afternoon.
The walls in the rain: honestly assessed
Two miles of walkway on top of a medieval wall, in the rain, with no shelter for long stretches. In light drizzle it is atmospheric and the crowds vanish, which is a real argument for doing it in poor weather. In heavy rain the sandstone gets slippery, the steps get treacherous and the views you came for are not there.
The compromise: walk the Eastgate to Northgate section, about fifteen minutes, which has the most to look at and the shortest exposure, and drop down into the cathedral at the end of it. Skip the river side, where the walkway is more open and the wind comes off the Dee.
When you give up
Chester has an unusual concentration of genuinely ancient pubs, which is the correct response to persistent rain. The Bear and Billet on Lower Bridge Street was built in 1664 for the Earls of Shrewsbury and is Grade I listed. The Falcon began as a house around 1200, was bought by Sir Richard Grosvenor in 1602, and enclosed its own stretch of the Rows in 1643 — so you are drinking inside what used to be a public walkway. Ye Olde King’s Head has early thirteenth-century stone cellars beneath it.
Eat and drink covers the areas and the rest of the historic pubs.
Or drive out of it
Weather on this coast is local, and an hour’s driving can change the day completely. If the rain is coming in off the Irish Sea, inland is often drier: day trips covers eight options, and the two indoor-heavy ones are Liverpool at twenty-two miles, with the free national museums on the waterfront, and Manchester.
Going the other way, the North Wales guides both keep proper wet-weather lists, because they need them more than Chester does — Conwy in the rain and Betws-y-Coed in the rain are worth a look before you commit to a drive west. In Eryri the cloud can sit on the tops all day while the coast stays clear, so check before heading for the mountains.
Practicalities
Covered ground. The Rows along Watergate, Eastgate and Bridge Street, plus Chester Market and the Grosvenor shopping centre, connect into a surprisingly long indoor route.
Free and indoors. Grosvenor Museum, the cathedral (a donation is asked), and the Storyhouse library.
Closed Mondays. Chester Market. Check before relying on it.
Parking. On a wet day the multi-storeys fill early. Getting here has the Park and Ride sites, which stay easier.
Plan the rest of your trip
If the forecast improves, Chester in a day is the dry-weather route round the city. Chester with kids covers the family version, what’s on has the year, and the history section is nineteen pages deep if you would rather read than get wet.
Hero photograph: Christopher Hilton (CC BY-SA 2.0), via Wikimedia Commons