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The site for Salisbury cathedral, although the subject of legends, can be seen with hindsight to be almost a foregone conclusion. The bishop’s estates ran in a great block of land from the castle south to the confluence of the Avon and the Nadder, and from the Avon eastwards to the hillslope of Milford. A north-south route ran from the castle to the Salisbury Way running along Harnham Ridge: it was crossed by the road from Winchester via Clarendon running westwards through Fisherton Anger towards Wilton. South of that road was to be the Close, with the first phase of houses for the canons backing onto the Avon, facing the west front of the Cathedral with the ancient north-south route running between them. To the north, the city was planned around a new street New Street today running east-west between the original settlement around St Martin’s Church, and a river crossing which is the present Crane Bridge. North of that, a great open space would be the site of a weekly market and an annual fair.

By the time of the Cathedral’s foundation on 28th April 1220, some houses has already been built in the close, whilst in the town a wooden chapel had been consecrated on the previous Trinity Sunday. Progress on the Cathedral was rapid, with the three eastern chapels being consecrated in October 1225, and the entire building being consecrated in 1258 in the presence of King Henry III. The Cathedral was actually completed on 25th March 1266, having cost 42,000 marks (£28,000). The major differences between the building at that date and the present Cathedral are, firstly, the cloisters and chapter-house, built over the next twenty years, and the spire, built probably during the episcopates of Roger de Martival and Simon of Ghent, completed by about 1330. At 404’ (123m), the spire is the tallest in the British Isles, and its survival is due to the bold decision to build it in stone. There is one other difference in the appearance of the close today, and that is that from when the cathedral was built until 1790 there was a free-standing campanile with a 200’ spire, standing just across the west end of the North Walk, and housing perhaps as many as twelve bells. With that loss Salisbury is one of the few English cathedrals whose worshippers cannot be summoned by the sound of bells.

Meanwhile, since the city’s founding, with Henry III’s charter of 30th January 1227, ideas about its scale had changed. Such had been the success of the new city that a grid of five streets from east to west, and six from north to south was devised, on what had been the common field of the ancient parish of St Martin. To the north of this chequerboard layout an enormous collegiate church was founded by Bishop Walter de la Wyle, and dedicated in 1269 to St Edmund of Abingdon, who, as Edmund Rich, had been the new cathedral’s treasurer in its earliest years. St Edmund’s lay at the city’s northern limit until the nineteenth century, just as did the city’s first church, dedicated to St Thomas a Becket, at the western edge. A key feature in Salisbury’s design was the widespread provision of running water through open watercourses along the streets. There are many medieval new towns built on a grid-pattern, and many more, like nearby Stockbridge, with water running along the main street. Salisbury was planned so that water could be drawn from the Avon as it runs southwards, diverted through the town and fed back into the river as it runs from west to east, and this feature explains why the chequers – the quarters bounded by the streets – are not perfectly rectangular.