When the question crops up, which was Worcester’s first housing development, the answer may surprise you. For it wasn’t Dines Green or Warndon, Tolladine or Ronkswood, not even Battenhall or Hanbury Park.

It was just beyond the northern edge of the city, the area which today is known as Britannia Square.

In the early 1800s it was beyond the city limits and mostly open countryside. It was here a man by the name of Handy, who lived in The Tything, owned a sizeable amount of land he used for the growing of flax. And by the look of it Mr Handy became Worcester’s first property developer.

By 1818 plans and a catalogue had been drawn up to convert the flax fields into housing and the building operations between 1820 and 1830 produced some of the city’s most charming Georgian homes.

During the work a hitch cropped up that will ring familiar to construction companies to this day. In the course of excavations in 1829 to lay the foundations for a property to be known as Springfield (later to become part of the Alice Ottley School and now a prep school in the RGS group) historical remains were uncovered.

They were the base of a circular tower or fort of sandstone, about 30ft in diameter, along with about 50 Roman coins. The structure was probably one of those constructed along the Severn in the reign of Claudius I in the 1st Century AD

Some of the coins were from the time of Constantius (aka Constantine the Great) and indeed John Ross, a writer of antiquities during the 1400s, had promoted the claim that Constantius was the founder of Worcester on the basis of an old British chronicle he had seen.

One of the most charming houses in the Square is number 49, once the home of Christopher Hebb, a noted physician who became Worcester’s first mayor after the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, which Hebb celebrated each year on November 9 by distributing tea and sugar to the poor.

However, one of the most impressive houses in the Square was actually built 100 years earlier, when it would have overlooked the flax fields.

Britannia House, on the east side of The Tything, dates from 1720 and at the time was the most ambitious private house in Worcester. It was the mansion of the Somers family and the figure of Britannia on the front of the property gave the name to Britannia Square..

After nearly two centuries as a private residence, the house was converted into a school for young gentlemen and in 1883 it became Worcester High School for Girls, a title later changed to the Alice Ottley School in honour of its first headmistress.