Coming out from the Cobb Gate circle, or coming up the sloping end of the Walk, or descending the steps from the Bell Cliff, you are in the town's central space. It's sometimes called the Square, though this usage may be recent. A sign “The Square” has been put up over the bus shelter, but this is probably because the bus company thinks it will denote “the middle” in passengers' minds. Or (as in a notice at one of the car parks) it is “Cobb Square,” presumably a shortening of “Cobb Gate Square.” Like many another English “square“, it is not square but triangular. Like the Cobb Gate circle, it is not a pedestrian space but a swirl-space for vehicles; pedestrians are supposed to cling to its edges, though in practice they assert their right to drift across it.
     It is the delta, as it were, to the river of Broad Street, up into whose narrow mouth you could turn leftward.
     Or you could pause to consider the several features that used to be grouped around this space and that, like the vanished Assembly Rooms and warehouses in the space behind you, were central to the old town. Across the street, Fordham's hardware store (with barber Paul above) is roughly on the site of the old Three Cups inn. What is now a car park behind it was the Fish Market. Next to the right, what has been called “the worst situated public toilet in Britain” is on the site of the Customs House. The old buildings that still exist are the inns either side of the entrance to Bridge Street: the Pilot Boat and the Rock Point.
     The Three Cups was the port hostelry, rowdy with seamen and merchants. Its name (originally just The Cups) derived from the coat of arms of the Company of Salters. It was destroyed in the fire of 1844, and did not arise like a Phoenix from the ashes. The site lay disfigured by rubbish until it was bought by “a London man” in 1850. The name of the Three Cups passed to a building that stands — now empty — half way up Broad Street; that's another story.
     The Customs House, built in Elizabethan times, kept its eye on the goods brought from the port to the warehouses and transported away inland. Along its side was the Walk, an arcade where people liked to meet, talk, and stroll along the riverbank — this being before the days when the Walk along the beach was practicable or fashionable. The Customs House too was destroyed in the 1844 fire, and a new one was built next to the harbour.
     The Pilot Boat almost overhangs the river. Inside is a cheerful bar with a corner window looking out on Cobb Gate, though few windows looking out on the river; and pictures on the wall tell the inn's proudest story.
     The mouth of Bridge Street is only eight yards wide. Yet once its width was only eight feet, because a building stood in its middle! Well, not quite the middle; it abutted the Rock Point inn. It was the Fossil Depot. It was demolished in 1913, to (as a Lyme Regis Society booklet says) “improve the road for that scourge of old towns, the motor car.”
     Mercifully the improvement was not pushed much further: the street remains narrow and, up ahead, turns a sharp right angle, so it has to be controlled by one-way-at-a-time lights. This dogleg canyon is a major traffic-calmer, perhaps the salvation of Lyme. Traffic still comes crowding in, but it has to creep in instead of racing in.