Rowe Street

William Rowe died in 1690, in his will he left four acres “under trust to bestow the profits thereof on clothes for the poor person in Plymouth”. He also left other lands and estates with instructions that some of the revenue from them should go to the education of local poor children.

In time this income found its way, by Act of Parliament, into the local Workhouse fund, but some resourceful individual managed to persuade the authorities that this wasn’t quite what had been intended and in 1814 Rowe’s estate and these other four acres were acquired from the Guardians of the School Committee - on a lease of 500 years, at a yearly rental of £10.

Here then Public School was built and Rowe Street, alongside it, one of the older streets on the northern edge of the modern city centre, running off Cobourg Street, still commemorates the original, albeit unwitting, benefactor today.