Windows on Cheltenham 2

Part two of an occasional series.

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Chester Walk

1820 map showing Chester Walk (just legible above and to the right of the churchyard) and its wider environs when the town was in its infancy. Clarence Street was then merely a stump occupied by a terrace called Bedford Buildings, leading up to the Royal Crescent via Crescent Place. The Promenade was newly formed and marked as Sherborne Rides and Walks. At the bottom of the map is the High Street, complete with grammar school, and to the right is St George’s Place. The letter ‘g’ half way up St George’s Place shows the location of Chester House, after which Chester Walk was probably named.

Chester Walk today is a little lane running round the back of the library (here it is on a Victorian sign on the library wall), though actually the library has occupied only a small part of its long history.

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Cheltenham Library was built in 1887, requiring the demolition of a chunk of the Bedford Buildings terrace shown on the map above.

At the time the library was built there was a dense row of houses all the way along both sides of Chester Walk. A contemporary photograph taken during the laying of the library’s foundation stone shows the north side of Chester Walk having a slightly tatty terrace of two storey cottages with a taller three storey terrace beyond it. Behind this cluster of housing was a mews yard, which later became a bakery, the premises of Worth’s Food Works. In 1901 it was taken over by Cheltine Food, another local food company specialising in the diets of invalids and diabetics. The company continued to trade there until 1973.

It’s likely that Chester Walk started out some considerable time ago as an unnamed pathway to the parish church, and took its moniker from a house built about 1800 which stood in St George’s Place facing its entrance. The house was called Chester House and seems to have been swallowed during Cheltenham’s main building boom of the Regency era. Chester House was itself named after a prominent local family, of whom the Revd John Chester was headmaster of the nearby grammar school from 1763-80.

Until the early 1800s there was very little going on here, just a lane through a field. Development started on the south side of the Walk, initially overlooking mostly gardens on the north side and a little chunk of arable land called Football Close. How the latter got its name is unknown, but it was called that at least as far back as 1605.

The corner facing onto St George’s Place (on the north side opposite the library) was apparently occupied by a building from early times, possibly an inn, given the later presence of mews buildings behind it. By 1870 it had been extended and became a corner pub called the Horse and Groom. The building still stands, but it’s no longer a pub. It closed some time around 1970 and was for many years occupied by a print and photocopying shop, while the upper floor was the studio of art restorer Nigel Cole. The name of the pub is immortalised on an engraved stone sign at the front.

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The first reference to Chester Walk by name is in 1812, which is probably when the first cottages on the south side were built, scathingly referred to by a town surveyor at that time as ’a nest of houses now erecting by a gentleman in Chester Walk’. The north side was occupied only by a single house, right next to the churchyard, whose site is now recognisable only by a change in the ground level.

It seems that around that time there was also a Chester Passage, as there’s a reference in the Paving Commissioners’ minutes in 1817 to the removal of some posts there. Perhaps it was an alleyway between the old cottages. 

The mews complex (or Cheltine Food site as it was during its last incarnation) was demolished in 1987 and made into a couple of scruffy car parks. At the front of the bigger car park the Music Library was built, as shown below. I have mixed feelings about the Music Library … being a musician I find it a great asset to the town but its plasticky 1980s design is a strangely incongruous thing to dump into this ancient churchyard lane.

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The photo below is taken from in front of the Music Library. These two cottages of c.1812 were once part of a terrace, some of whose lower remains are still detectable by their surviving doorways. They’ve been in this condition for as long as I can remember … certainly when I was living in St George’s Place in 1992 in a tiny bedsit I used to walk past them on a daily basis and wish I could have one of them so I could do it up and live in it. As it is, they have remained homes for buddleias.

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And behind the Music Library … the Cheltine Food site, now a large empty expanse of shabby car park overlooked by the backs of houses in St George’s Place.

These houses on the left look old but actually only the right hand two are original, dating from the 1790s. The terrace included the home (from 1795 to 1820) of Dr Edward Jenner who discovered vaccination, an important part of Cheltenham’s heritage until some dunderheaded eejits on the planning committee in 1969 allowed Jenner’s house and its neighbour to be demolished. So lamented was this stupid decision that a replica was built in 1994, part of a positive general trend towards reconstructing Cheltenham’s neoclassical streescape. Sadly this initiative seems to have foundered in the last few years, with the council once again happy to let developers slap up tasteless postmodern tat everywhere. But at least this cluster here shows that sensitive modern development can be done.

Below is the one remaining unspoiled view, looking back towards Chester Walk from the churchyard, where it bends round into Well Walk. The corner building here still has its lovely 19th century shopfront and has housed a Thai restaurant for a number of years now. But before the second world war it was a pawnbroker’s shop. In the background is the tower of the library. See how tiny those two uninhabited cottages look, sandwiched between the tall Regency endhouse and the back of the Cheltenham Art Gallery and Museum.

If you look carefully at the grassy area you’ll see that the ground level ramps up at the back. This marks the site of an old house (shown as far back as the 1806 map) which was demolished for churchyard expansion. Notice also the “dragon and onion” street lamp on the left just inside the churchyard. This is one of a handful which still survive in the town, though the bases of a few more can also be found if you look out for them. The lamps were designed in the 1890s by the very aesthetic-minded borough engineer, Joseph Hall, and are quite exquisitely dramatic in style and detail.

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1806 map (oriented with south-west at the top). The area was much less built up here than it was on the 1820 map above. Well Walk went streaming away across the empty fields and Chester Walk was a simple link lane to St George’s Place and almost unbuilt. Clarence Street didn’t exist and in its place was the Great House, built  in 1730 for Lady Stapleton and formerly the heart of 18th century Cheltenham social life … it stood on the site now occupied by St Matthew’s church. In St George’s Place, the short terrace with the semicircle in front was where Dr Jenner lived. The semicircle was a carriage-turning area. Dr Jenner bought the plot of land behind the semicircle to use as a private garden, to supplement the small one already at the back of his house. Later in the 19th century the gardens were built on, forming a cul-de-sac called Jenner Walk.

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1921 map, with all its amazing detail. The backside of the library was by this time the main occupant of the lane, but the older buildings are pretty tightly packed in too! By this time the house on the opposite corner facing Well Walk had been demolished and its site taken up by expansion of the churchyard. But the Cheltine Food site was still alive and kicking, on the site of the current Music Library and the car park. Below the churchyard you might also notice the old terrace around the curve of Clarence Street. A whole swathe of these (including the entire east side of Well Walk) were demolished in the 1960s to accommodate the vast bulk and saggy brutalism of the former Cheltenham & Gloucester Building Society offices, whose bland backside even swallowed up the lower part of Church Lane … one of Cheltenham’s only medieval streets! Those few years were truly a nightmare of developmental insanity.

All photos taken December 2008

Normanhurst

Normanhurst is a large private house, currently in use as a residential care home, in Christchurch Road on the corner of Eldorado Road.

I don’t know very much about this beautiful Gothic-inspired house except that it was built in 1882 by a family called Smith.

Between 1933 and 1979 it was the home of a fearsome lady magistrate, Stella Louise Ingram.

What makes this house extraordinary, as you can see, is the elaborate arrangement of oddly shaped gables and the spectacular array of figures and esoteric symbols carved in local Cotswold stone, cluttered and overwhelming but the work of a stone-carving genius. Sunbursts, lion-heads, leaves, flowers, horned shapes, animals and birds adorn every window frame and sticky-outy bit, orderly but asymmetrical, immaculately chiselled from an amazingly fertile imagination.

Around the side of the house which overlooks Eldorado Road is a series of jack-in-the-green faces. The design is more restrained along this side and the gables have simple clean lines, but the craftsmanship is equally impressive.

Normanhurst is completely unlike any of the other houses in Christchurch Road, solidly chunky brick-built villas being the norm here. But round the corner in Queen’s Road you can find a row of six villas which may have been worked on by the same craftsman. The houses themselves are nothing like Normanhurst, but above their doors they have panels of carvings (all different) which show a similar menagerie of animals and birds.

The only other place in Cheltenham I know of with similarly eccentric critter carvings (in a much less ostentatious setting) is the west side of Wellington Square, which again has a range of different animals in odd places but is a few years older, completed in 1859. Whether there’s any connection I don’t know.

Green man faces on gables on the north side.

Normal Terrace

Beckingsale’s Passage = Normal Terrace

Normal Terrace is my all-time favourite Cheltenham street name. And before you ask, no, there’s no corresponding Abnormal Terrace or Freak Mews.

So how does a street get such a strange name? Well, I’m afraid the answer is quite ordinary. The lane runs through from the High Street to near the front of Gloucestershire  University’s Francis Close campus in Swindon Road. Back in 1849, long before it was a university, the campus was a teacher training college known as the Church of England Normal College. Now you might still be wondering why the heck it was called Normal College. But that, believe it or not, was then the normal name for a teacher-training college. It referred to the fact that its students were trained to teach within an established set of educational standards, known as “norms”.

The street name Normal Terrace came into use some time around 1874, but the lane was originally called Beckingsale’s Passage. The old name lingered for a long time even after the new one was introduced, as you can see on the map above, which dates from 1921.

Arguably the oldest part of Normal Terrace is its entrance onto the High Street, because there has always been a gap in the terrace here. Originally it just led into the back gardens of High Street buildings before the lane itself was formed. There were also a couple of cottages at its northern end, but nothing connecting the two until the 1830s. The first indication I can find of its existence as a lane is the 1834 map, where it goes right through to Swindon Road, but unnamed.

The southern entrance is through a shop which has for many years been Hardings electrical shop, a wonderful old-fashioned emporium which will be forever ingrained in the town’s social history.

High Street shop front of Harding’s Electronic Components, with the southern end of Normal Terrace going right through the building via a lopsided doorway.

And a short way down the passage it opens up onto one of the most delightfully unspoiled pockets of working-class 19th century Cheltenham, just yards from the busy High Street.

This mini-courtyard features a decorated old iron pillar holding the corner of the building up, and the original flagstone pavement. I’m not sure what it was originally built for, but it’s some kind of small commercial building. It still has an old wooden trapdoor over a cellar … right in front of a door, which must surely have precipitated a mishap or two over the last 170 years.

And the next thing you get to is this cottage. The back part is an extension on a much older building, but its roof garden is one of the summer highlights of Normal Terrace. This winter photo doesn’t do it justice, but all credit to the residents for the care they put into making it such a gorgeous spectacle in summer.

It would appear that Normal Terrace has been built only on its west side, for the most part. The east side appears to have had stretches of open ground along it separating it from the backs of houses in St Paul’s Street South (a notorious slum area in Victorian times, regenerated in the 1930s).

The west side however has several short terraces of cottages. These shown below were already built by 1834. Notice the “speckled” chequerwork pattern of the brick, created by interspersing the red bricks with yellow ones. This pattern is a regular feature among Cheltenham’s “artisan” houses. The middle cottage still has its original windows, and the one on the right its original railings. Though quite what the point was of fencing in a front yard that’s barely big enough for a person to squeeze into …

So much for Normal Terrace. You may be wondering how it came by its original name, Beckingsale’s Passage. It took the name from a grocer’s shop in the High Street, and it was certainly called that by 1847. Beckingsale’s was a well known shop in its day, even featured in George Rowe’s illustrated guide to the town, and purveyor of the “celebrated Royal Cheltenham sausages”. 

Just to confuse matters, there was another Beckingsale’s in the High Street from 1864 onwards, but that one was opposite the Plough Hotel and traded as a shirt manufacturer offering “outfits for India and the Colonies”, with not a sausage in sight.

Just in case you still don’t believe the lane is really called that …

All photos taken January 2009

Duke Street

There were so many fashionable aristocrats in the early 19th century it’s difficult to know which one inspired the naming of Duke Street in the early 1820s. Maybe it was the Duke of Wellington whose name is liberally spattered across the Regency parts of town, or perhaps the Duke of Marlborough, given that the Marlborough Arms was the name of a local pub. But then pubs were once abundant in Duke Street too …

The Marlborough Arms stood on the corner between Duke Street and Prince’s Street, a mid-Victorian beerhouse belonging to the Cheltenham Original Brewery (that’s the one which is now converted into the Brewery shopping centre in Henrietta Street) and seems to have closed around the 1930s. It originally had a corner doorway on that blank wall at the front, but that has been bricked up. There’s a small stone ledge over the existing door on the Duke Street side but no obvious surviving pub features. It’s now a residential house.

Former Marlborough Arms pub

At 14 Duke Street (probably no.28 in the old numbering scheme), on the north side, you would once have found the Talbot Inn. One of its early landlords, in 1850, was John Maskelyne, very probably a relative of the famous illusionist John Nevil Maskelyne who was born in Cheltenham. The pub had a fairly broad frontage, probably 1820s vintage, with mullioned windows. One of the longest surviving Duke Street pubs, it continued trading right up until 1984, and after closure it was converted into three small houses (numbered 14, 14a and 14b). The conversion required some alteration of the frontage and you would never know there had ever been a pub there.

On the south side is 71 Duke Street (formerly no. 66), once a beerhouse which traded as the Duke’s Head from the 1830s until some time before the second world war. It too is now a private house. In its early days it was run by Richard Savory, who was also involved in building work in the street. It may have been him who built the pub.

The pink house in the middle was Richard Savory’s Duke’s Head beerhouse. It still has an interesting ground floor window, and a Victorian drainpipe! The left hand doorway is a passageway which probably once led to Savory’s Court.

Another pub which was in existence by 1859 and the only one still open today is the New Inn (one of two pubs in Cheltenham to have that name) on the corner of Duke Street and Hewlett Road. According to the excellent Gloucestershire pubs website it once had a ‘men only’ bar, which prevailed into the 1970s. It was originally tied to the old Carlton Brewery in neighbouring Carlton Street, which had been bought out by a Bristol-based brewery by the 1890s. In recent years it’s seen two new incarnations, the Pump and Optic and more recently the Fiery Angel.

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Duke Street is one of Cheltenham’s older terraced streets of what is now usually called “artisan” housing. That’s the polite way of saying it used to be a rough old dump inhabited by the town’s poor but as the inherent value of Cheltenham real estate has lifted it out of slumhood the houses have been modernised and scrubbed up and become nice places to live.

For much of the 19th century the street was home to a profusion of laundry women and agricultural labourers. Some of the residents had colourful names. In the 1881 census there is Mary Onion, who worked as a ladies’ outfitter, and an elderly widowed lady called Philadelphia Taylor. While the Talbot Inn was home to Nellie Bowl, a milliner, whose father was the pub landlord. George Kibblewhite was a gardener, and Nathaniel Spratt a shopkeeper, and Annie Lapper made her living as a dressmaker. The best of the strange names though is the baker at no.2 who went by the name of William H. Cowmeadow.

Among the many washerwomen in the street in 1881 was widow Mary Barnett and her three unmarried daughters, who were all laundresses. They also had 3-year-old Florry Hooper in their care, who is simply listed as a “relative”. Say no more.

Despite its early origins Duke Street was a long time in the making and was patched together from the disjointed works of several unrelated builders. But that’s what makes this street so interesting … lots of diversity.

A diversity of building styles joined together. The wide panel on the front of the mauve house suggests it may once have been business premises.

Its origins go back to before 1820, as it appears on the Post Office map as a solitary road laid out across fields on the rural edges of town, just off the “Road from Hewlett’s”, with three cottages already built (completely separate and some distance apart) on the north side and further plots marked out ready for building. It predates most of the Fairview estate on the other side of Hewlett Road, which was then entirely agricultural land with only Sherborne Street and Sherborne Place under construction.

1820 map, showing Duke Street emerging from a very rural setting. The only other development at that time was a plant nursery, whose garden plots and long terrace of outbuildings is shown on the north side where Leighton Road is today. The little thin lane on the far left is what shortly afterwards became St Anne’s Terrace, and the tiny dotted footpath in the top left corner is All Saints Road!

From 1820 onwards several more cottages appeared, and work was still in progress 14 years later when Henry Merrett made his wondrous 1834 map. By then the street was laid out as a full terrace, loaded with numerous mini-courtyards and tiny cottages tucked away down alleyways. But even so a minority had actually been built, and it was not so much a terrace as several groups of 2, 3, 4 or 5 houses.

1834 map. Duke Street is still unfinished here (the darker blue shows the houses which were actually built by then, the lighter ones are just plots in progress) but the surrounding area is taking shape. The nursery had expanded (it survived well into the 20th century). Carlton Street was just starting to develop, with the Carlton Brewery shown here on the south side. All Saints Road was established and already had some terraced cottages built, along with a terrace called Jersey Place along Hewlett Road. On the left hand side you can see two other landmarks … St John’s church, built in 1827 and demolished in 1967, and St Ann’s Cottage, a large fine house in extensive gardens which still stands today but completely integrated among other houses in present day St Anne’s Road.

Most of the groups of cottages in Duke Street originally had their own names …

Thatch Cottage or Cottages are listed in the 1841 and 1881 census, occupied by a laundress called Maria Hamlett in the 1850s and a housepainter called Joseph Jewell in the 1880s. It seems to have been next door to the Talbot inn. There are no thatched cottages in the street today.

Woodbine Cottages were apparently between Carlton Street and the west end of Duke Street. They’re mentioned on the 1841 census and the 1855-7 Old Town Survey.

Halford’s Cottages, 3 houses on the south side between nos. 48 and 50, date back to at least 1844, when one of them was occupied by a carpenter called William Halford. I haven’t yet established whether he was related to the William Halford (also at one time a carpenter) who was Katherine Monson’s clerk of works and later took her in when she was broke.

Duke’s Head Cottages (3 houses) and Duke’s Court (2 houses) are on either side of the former Duke’s Head beerhouse at no. 71.

Cirencester Cottages was a row of 4 houses between nos. 69 and 73. All four were listed in a 1935 slum clearance programme.

Morgan’s Cottages (2 houses), Prince’s Cottages (3 houses) and Prince’s Place (a passage off the east end, behind Marlborough Place) are not referred to until the 1870s, by which time the terrace was fully joined up.

1921 plan of Duke Street, when the street was fully built and still had most of its courtyard housing. Notice how the higgledy piecemeal building of this street contrasts with the orderly rows in upmarket Leighton Road. The P.H. symbols show the locations of the New Inn (Fiery Angel) and the Talbot.

Like all Cheltenham’s poor areas the street was crammed with extra houses behind the existing ones. Although most of the rear courtyard housing has been demolished, you can often recognise their former sites by the gaps through the terrace, doorways and passages now incorporated into gardens but once giving access to tiny shadowy cottages.

Although they were sometimes named after residents, the courtyards were more usually named after the builders who put them up. Or both: Savory’s Court was a group of at least three houses built by the Duke’s Head landlord Richard Savory around 1838. In the 1841 census it’s called Savoury’s Yard. The yard is not there any more, demolished in early 20th century slum clearance. Another similar example is Teal’s Court, which has had a range of spelling variations (Teale’s Court, Tale’s Court, Teile’s Cottages) but is named after Thomas Teal, who was a local builder active in Cheltenham from the 1830s onwards. It consisted of 5 backyard houses accessed from the frontage of no. 56. In 1913 Cheltenham Borough Council condemned them as unfit for habitation.

Douro Road

Complete with authentic basal dandelion, this Penfold pillar box is one of eight survivors of its type in Cheltenham. They were made between 1866 and 1879 by the Cochrane Grove Company in Dudley and are one of the most distinctive and flamboyant of mail receptacles. You can recognise them by their hexagonal shape and beaded edge, topped with flowing acanthus leaves and an elegant central bud. Not so easy to see in this photo, it also has on the front a coat of arms and Queen Victoria’s cipher (monogram). Cheltenham is thought to have the largest number of still-in-use Penfold pillar boxes outside London. And this one here is in Douro Road.

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This very pretty residential street connects up two of Cheltenham’s landmark streets, Lansdown Crescent and Christchurch Road. It’s smaller scale than its companions but very much in keeping with their self-assured image. Shamelessly prettified mini-villas in semi-detached pairs make up a large part of the street, but there’s quite a bit of variety overall.

The street can probably trace its origins to the 1840s. Merrett’s 1834 map showed the Lansdown estate as it was planned rather than as it was actually built, and includes only a short section of Douro Road’s southern end surrounded by large villas. Most of the villas were never built, and the upper part of Douro Road was developed in a straight line across the estate rather than curving eastwards as initially envisioned.

The road in its present form first appears on maps in 1840 but there was no housing development at that time, it was simply a link road between the two senior streets, known as Sefton Place. By the time it started to be built up, the name Douro Road had been adopted for about half of it, the other half being called Northwick Road.

The name Douro comes from a river negotiated by the Duke of Wellington during the Peninsular War in 1809. His efforts there earned him the title of Marquess of Douro.

Northwick Road crops up in the Streets and Highways Commission report for April 1876 when the Misses Lingwood and others complained about the condition of the footpaths in the area. The following month another complaint was made by Colonel Lewes, who asked for nameplates to be put at either end of Northwick Road to distinguish the two roads. The committee apparently decided instead that the whole lot should be called Douro Road.

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These houses are part of a group of six built in 1847 by builder George Dover of Tivoli Place, and once had their own separate name, Douro Villas.

Driveway decoration: a 1963 Morris Minor.

The southerly end of Douro Road runs alongside the pretty triangle of open green in front of Lansdown Parade and Lansdown Crescent. This spacious green is crucial to the character of this magnificent area and it’s difficult to imagine it without it, but originally it was intended to be built on. The plan for the Lansdown estate was for the whole of this central green to be filled up with villas, but it ran into financial difficulties and this area was left unbuilt.

Photos taken October 2008

Bad planning: how the Engineers got spannered

St Paul’s Road, on the corner of Brunswick Street. The Engineers Arms pub (above) stood here for over 100 years, its bay-windowed frontage surrounded by trees and its beer garden secluded behind high Victorian walls. This monstrous piece of shite is going up in its place.

How the pound signs must have lit up in the developers’ eyes when they got their chance to slap a cheapie block of flats up on this key corner site. But it’s turned out to be a bit of a white (and brown) elephant, standing abandoned and unfinished for some while. It has already had paint thrown over it, such is the contempt and disgust it inspires among local residents.

OK, so St Paul’s is not one of Cheltenham’s nicest places (I know, I used to live there) but it has always kept an authentically earthy 19th century character. That character has taken a hell of a bashing in the last decade, as amongst other things it’s lost its wedge-shaped Victorian malt house, countless tucked-away historic outbuildings (oh so tempting to cram a new house in those spaces) and its imposing old two-tone brick hospital and workhouse. It’s gained a rash of cheap hamster-cage houses, a block of plasticky student flats and a massive parking problem. The southern side now looks out over the butt end of an offensively ugly hotel and multi-storey car park, two unsightly zits which sprang up on the face of the 2006 Brewery redevelopment. Let’s face it, all the crappiest ideas that get shat out the arse end of town planning end up here. And I really think the selfish idiots who dump bad developments on areas where they don’t have to live should give St Paul’s a break now.

If I’d known the Engineers pub was under threat of redevelopment I’d have taken some more photographs of it. As it is, I never expected anyone would want to demolish it, and the side view along St Paul’s Road (at the top of the post) taken towards the end of 2003, when the pub had been derelict for more than a year, is the only one I have. Three months later, it looked like this:

The demolition was a pointless waste. The Engineers was a curious and characterful building. In some ways it looked like a typical residential house of the late 19th century, with bay windows top and bottom and a sloping roofline. But it had a ‘false entrance’, a blocky portal butting up to the pavement which formed a passage to the pub itself, which was set back within its gardens and almost totally obscured by trees.

The pub first opened as the Engineers Arms alehouse in or before 1891, possibly equipped with its own brewery and possibly incorporating parts of an older house, and it was run by the Cheltenham Original Brewery. The landlord back then was Benjamin Ratcliffe, who had handed over to Annie Matilda Walter by 1903, and then through the First World War and the 1920s it was run by Sidney and Emily Tibbles.

It’s always a bad sign when pubs start changing their names. In the 90s the Engineers Arms became the New Engineers for a few years, then briefly flailed as the New Ale House before whimpering out of business in 2002.

The tall Victorian brick wall with its old cast iron name plate was lost. So were all the trees. When it was demolished a network of large cellars was exposed underneath.

Cellars under the Engineers Arms pub site, early 2004

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This shaft into the cellars was in the driveway into the pub’s courtyard. The hole is roughly 10 or 12ft deep and the passage below extends under the pavement. Photographed in 2004.

It’s interesting in view of a local rumour about underground passageways going under St Paul’s church, almost exactly on the opposite side of the road. Urban myths about subterranean passageways are common in most towns and there’s never been any real evidence that one exists here, but these things often have some basis in reality. The hidden cellars extended some way under the road towards the church. Maybe they add weight to the idea that there was a brewery on site, or maybe they belonged to the house which occupied the site before …

The Engineers itself replaced a Regency-era house, Hamilton Cottage. Don’t be fooled by the word “cottage” … it was a large and prestigious house and dated from the period when it was fashionable to call such things cottages. Hamilton Cottage is depicted very clearly (my label) on the 1820 map, which even details the layout of its extensive gardens.

It was probably built some time after 1806 and pre-dates St Paul’s church and much of the rest of St Paul’s, and was originally surrounded on three sides by fields. It was described in 1820 as being in “a retired airy part of town” – not a description you’d recognise today.

1820 map, showing Hamilton Cottage (the Engineers pub site) in a then almost empty St Paul’s Road, before the church was built. The only street in existence was the southern part of Brunswick Street, originally called Rutland Street. The small terraced houses here were built between 1806 and 1810. Also present but undeveloped is the line of St Paul’s Lane, and the turnpike road to Swindon. The house marked with a ‘g’ at the bottom of the map is 18th century Woodbine Cottage, later known as North Lodge and then Dunalley Lodge, which still survives today, sideways on to the road and well hemmed in by Victorian terraces so you’d hardly know it was there.

I don’t know when or why Hamilton Cottage bit the dust, but a Hamilton reference survives in the name of a Victorian terrace across the street, now part of St Paul’s Road but it still bears its old Hamilton Place nameplate.

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Photographed December 2008

And at the end of 2008, almost five years after the pub was obliterated, the site is still a mess. Boarded over with hardboard and plastic sheeting, and with bricks missing from around its unfinished windows, the new occupant of this site is a crass intrusion. Look how out of proportion it is to the Victorian terrace on the other side. The Engineers pub had a garden at the front and a courtyard at the back, but this clumsy slab butts right up to the boundary on all sides to squeeze as many units as possible into the available space. Its height is disproportionate and the styling cheap and thoughtless, flat-pack architecture from the bargain bin, and all the style of a Kit-Kat with the chocolate picked off. The front lower corner is built of bricks which don’t match the others, forming a discoloured patch. It isn’t even built yet and already it looks as though a generation of dog wee has soaked up into it. What an insult to the beautiful 1820s Greek Revival architecture it faces across the road. And to St Paul’s residents, who now have to walk past this shameless bulk on a daily basis. And in fact they have to walk on the other side of the road, because the pavement is swallowed up by a Portaloo and corrugated iron sheets, and pedestrians take their lives into their hands trying to get past it.

For gawd’s sake get shot of this junk and all its sorry ilk. Cheltenham deserves better.

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With thanks to the Gloucestershire Pubs site for information about the pub history.

Windows on Cheltenham 1

St George’s Road

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Wellington Square, Pittville

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Oxford Parade, London Road

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Bayshill Road

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Back of building in the Lower High Street, from St Mary’s churchyard

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Suffolk Road

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Southwood Lane

Photos taken November 2008

Unobtrusive and semi-invisible (in the sense that you can walk past them dozens of times without really noticing they’re there), service lanes are a common feature in Cheltenham’s Regency areas. Most of the grand houses and terraces of that period had these narrow roads running along the back of them where stables, coach-houses, staff cottages and other necessary clutter could be kept conveniently to hand but discreetly out of sight. One such unassuming thoroughfare is Southwood Lane, which runs in a straight line between the top end of Suffolk Square (near the Montpellier roundabout) and the bottom end of Lypiatt Road, originally serving the backsides of the fine villas in both streets.

Surprisingly, the lane seems to have been unnamed for the first 140 years or so of its existence, only acquiring the name Southwood Lane in 1960. It was named after a house in Lypiatt Road called Southwood, which was formerly a boarding house belonging to Cheltenham College and one of several of their properties to bear that name over the years. The house, in turn, was named after the Rev. Thomas Southwood, who was a headmaster in the 19th century.

There isn’t as much to see in Southwood Lane as there is in some of the other service lanes in Cheltenham. But it has this very nice pair of cottages called Coach House Mews which still sport a lot of original features including a wooden hatch in the wall at pavement level and vertical decorative stripes incorporating the window frames. Notice how deep set the windows and doors are, a clue to the age of these cottages, which actually pre-date the lane they stand in.

The coach house (far right of the picture) and these mews cottages are the only surviving relic of Suffolk House, a supergrand double bow-fronted house built by the Earl of Suffolk around 1808 on the corner plot between Suffolk Square and Southwood Lane and now the site of some grimly utilitarian 1930s flats whose dark bulk and charming fire-escape stairways overshadow the cottages. Suffolk House is one of the town’s lamented lost buildings but was itself built on the site of an 18th century house, Galipot Farm, whose name survives only in the name of a cottage in nearby Andover Road.

The 1834 map shows Southwood Lane running across what had recently been fields and without following the old field boundaries. It had several other mews cottages by then, on both sides. The map also shows that Lypiatt Road was previously called Suffolk Lawn and was only developed on its east side at that time.

1834 map showing Southwood Lane (unnamed) running behind Suffolk House, complete with cottages and outbuildings. Suffolk Lawn (now called Lypiatt Road) was only developed on one side and overlooked open fields. Suffolk Square was still only partially completed. Two more disused names shown here are Suffolk Place (now part of Suffolk Square) and Montpellier Gate (where the elongated roundabout and Gordon Lamp are now).

Southwood Lane is not shown on the 1820 Post Office map, so it most likely dates not from the building of Suffolk House itself but from the development of the rest of the rest of the Galipot Farm site in the 1820s.

The opposite side of the lane, and the back gateways of Regency houses in Lypiatt Road.