Until the building of the railway and the new bypass, the High Street was a busy main road, particularly towards the end of the 18th century with the development of stage coaching and the increase in heavy haulage. It is probably for this reason that most of the properties in the High Street that did not front directly onto the road were hidden behind high walls. Nevertheless, this route was often preferred to the Upper Bristol Road, which was more likely to be congested with wagons from the Kingswood collieries. After 1840 however, when ‘through’ traffic ceased, Twerton Village seems to have become a ‘backwater’. Even up to WWII, cattle were still driven along the High Street from the fields in Shophouse Lane to the farm behind Mill Lane, or from the Pound Ground into Church Farm. Nevertheless, as a busy community it was well served with public transport, first by the railway station, followed in 1880 by the early horse buses. Neither of these services however operated from the High Street. The entrance to the Station was from the Lower Bristol Road (until a bridge was provided over the line to the down platform in the 1890s), and the buses (replaced by electric trams in 1904) terminated outside the Railway Hotel opposite the Station. The low railway arch is still an obstacle to high vehicles, but in the days when it conducted two-way traffic, its width was also a cause of traffic obstruction.

Twerton Station