Sell your Rolex Shrewsbury

Shrewsbury, the county town of Shropshire, lies on the River Severn, 9 miles east of the English border with Wales. Anecdotally christened ‘The Jewel of the Severn’, the centre of Shrewsbury lies within a natural loop of the river, making it an ideal place to establish an early settlement. Initially the main town of the Kingdom Of Powys, Shrewsburys’ original name was Scrobbesbyrig, meaning the fortified place. This then became Schrosberie and finally Shrewsbury.

Starting life as a wooden stockade during the time of the Anglo-Saxons, Shrewsbury saw many conflicts between the English and the Welsh due to its physical location. Shrewsbury was given to Roger de Montgomery as a gift by King William 1, and continued to grow and flourish. William began construction of a castle in Shrewsbury, subsequently finished and then expanded by Roger de Montgomery. The castle is now home to the Shropshire Regimental Museum, which contains many historical artefacts related to Shrewsburys military past. These include the first VC awarded to a British soldier in WWII, the baton carried by Hitlers successor, Admiral Karl Donitz and a lock of hair belonging to Napoleon Bonaparte.

The fortunes of Shrewsbury were particularly lifted in the middle ages when it became a major trading post for Welsh wool. Shrewsbury became the main distributor of Welsh wool to the rest of Britain and Western Europe. The major trading routes were the river itself and Watling Street (now the A5), built by the Romans to connect London to Virconium (now Wroxeter), a major Roman settlement of the time, the ruins of which lie a few miles outside Shrewsbury.

During the English civil war, Shrewsbury was a royalist stronghold, only falling to parliamentarian forces after a gate within the town walls was opened by a parliamentarian sympathiser. (The gate is still known as ‘Traitors Gate’ to this day).

Moving on to more modern times, Shrewsbury has become centres for both the tourism industry and the service sector. Shrewsbury has a wealth of Medieval, Tudor and Georgian buildings, laid out in a random, organic manner, with many narrow passages, known locally as ‘shuts’ connecting one part of the town with another. Tourists visit Shrewsbury from all over the world, notably from Japan.

Shrewsbury is also known as ‘The Town of Flowers, partly due to the annual Shrewsbury Flower Show, the worlds oldest continuously held floral show, held every August in the towns main park. A ‘Britain in Bloom’ winner on more than one occasion, the town council and many local businesses pride themselves on the floral displays maintained all over the town throughout the year.

Shrewsbury was recently listed (Jan 2021) in a national newspaper as one of the Top 20 nicest towns to live in the UK.