MAP LEGEND
1. Courthouse and prison
2. The church
3. Parade
4. Governor's house
5. Store houses
6. Pallisade forts
7. Barracks in the same
8. Line of palisade to defend the town
9. Showing the number of lots
10. Victualling office
As shown in the Gentleman's Magazine - 1749
From "Halifax Warden of the North" by Thomas H. Raddall
The expedition's engineer John Bruce and the surveyor Charles Morris laid out the new town on the harbor slope of Citadel Hill. The plan conceived in London was ambitious. The Gentleman's Magazine declared: "That city is at first to consist of 2,000 houses, disposed into fifty streets of different magnitudes. In the middle of the town is to be a spacious square with an equestrian statue of His Majesty."
On the spot, Bruce and Morris laid out a town much more modest, in blocks 320 by 120 feet, and with less than a dozen streets. Each block contained sixteen house lots 60 feet deep with a 40 foot front. the streets were 55 feet wide.The "spacious square" was in fact a rectangle of rough ground on the steep face of the hill. It was proposed to build a church at the north end of it, and at the south end a combined jail and courthouse. Eventually the church (St. Paul's) was built at the south end; but the first courthouse occupied a site on Buckingham Street to the north, and the first jail was established in a stone house built by Colonel Horsman near the site of St. Mary's Basilica far to the south. The "equestrian statue of His Majesty" never materialized, and Halifax was spared the sight of George II mounted on anything so uncongenial as a horse.
