Name: ROCHE
Council: Restormel Borough Council
Main period of  industrial  settlement growth: 1820s; c1900
Study Area: Hensbarrow
Location: Mid Cornwall, 6 miles north-west of St Austell
Main industry: Tin streaming, china clay

Industrial history and significance

Roche was a churchtown, an administrative, ecclesiastical, manorial and service centre. It was never simply, perhaps hardly at all, an industrial settlement, although tin-streaming was still important in the 18th/early 19th centuries, and may partly have stimulated the creation of the location/smallholding settlement here. Later industry was located away from the village – industrial settlements sprung up close to the actual works.

Roche remained a place of some quality and pretensions, as befitted its historical role, with a remarkable collection of high status sites and variety of buildings. Workshops, trades and services served the traditional part industrial/mainly agricultural economy, but there was an undoubted increase in scale because of the 19th century growth in the clay industry.

Roche’s significance in an industrial context is as a measure of the complexity and diversity of the traditional churchtown settlement as it was affected by industrial development in its hinterland, as a control against which to measure such complexity (or lack of it) in the more purely industrial settlements.

Downloads:

The downloads offered below represent the different elements of the CISI Roche Report including the core text and the seven illustrative map figures.
 

Title	Description	Format	Size
CISI Roche report	Report text.		1124kb
Figure 1	Location map		197kb
Figure 2a	Historical development map		315kb
Figure 2b	"		356kb
Figure 3a	Surviving historical components map		254kb
Figure 3b	"		234kb
Figure 4a	Gazetteer sites, existing designations and recommendations map		318kb
Figure 4b	"		303kb

Last Updated: 16/12/2004. © Cornwall County Council, Historic Environment Service.