Unknown – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

The former Lion Hotel, High Street (largely demolished)

The former Lion Hotel, High Street (largely demolished)In its heyday this popular establishment in High Street was formed from two previously separate businesses, the Lion and the King’s Head. Only the latter survives – in part – today (2020), as a restaurant at No.15.

The original Lion was within the four-gabled building to the left in the historic view, and was demolished in 1936, along with the tall Victorian gabled structure which linked it to the King’s Head, the twin-gabled building to the right. This building dates from 1291 and was jettied both to the High Street and to a passageway to the left.

The earliest recorded date for the Red Lion and the Kings Head is 1734. Later, the Lion was one of the places from which coaches left Abingdon for distant destinations, though by 1844 these were largely ferrying passengers to and from the nearest railway stations at Culham and Steventon.

Around 1866 the two inns were amalgamated to become the Red Lion and later, simply the Lion. Its position in the centre of Abingdon was important. It was near the cattle market and traders gathered at the Lion to arrange deals. Its rooms were used for balls and auction sales.

In 1911 the Lion was bought by William Henry and Alice Mayhead. Their story is told in the article on The Mayhead family & the Lion Hotel.

After the demolition of the old Lion building, the King’s Head continued to trade as The Lion public house, but it closed in 1987 and almost suffered the same fate as its neighbour, but while the building was being stripped out evidence of an early structure was found and demolition work was stopped. The evidence can be seen in the upper room, which has a remarkable roof structure, the earliest part of which dates from 1291, making it so far the earliest reliably dated domestic building in Abingdon.

It is of a type known as a crown-post roof, enhanced two hundred years later in 1501 by the replacement of one of the crown posts by a pair of curved scissor-braces. These have grooves to support a plaster ceiling.

Crown-post roof, showing rear bay and both crown posts. The collar purlin is the long horizontal timber in the centre.
© D Clark

Scissor braced truss
© D Clark

This roof is within the left-hand gable as viewed from the street. In the right-hand gable is a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century plaster barrel-vault with a moulded cornice, obscuring the timber structure above.

See Glossary for explanation of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2020

Maud Hales Terrace, Abingdon Bridge

Although officially in Culham rather than Abingdon, Maud Hales Terrace is passed by all who walk across the bridge to and from the Rye Farm car park. In 1429 Maud Hales, widow of William, a mercer, funded an extension of the main bridge at Abingdon – called Burford Bridge – by adding the three arches at the south end, which although rebuilt in 1929 are still known as Maud Hales’ Bridge. A stone plaque on the pair of houses at the south end – Maud Hales Terrace 1753 – is enigmatic, however. There is no evidence that the terrace had this name in the eighteenth century, and the houses on which it is placed date from the second half of the nineteenth century!

Name and date stone © D Clark, 2016

The land was owned by Christ’s Hospital, whose predecessors, the Fraternity of the Holy Cross, had built the bridge in 1416, and was a garden in the 1650s when the first house – No. 1, the twin gabled cottage painted pink – was built. About a century later another house was built to the south, part of which survives behind the pair with the datestone. In the 1830s George Keates, a barge-owner, built the tall row of four narrow houses (Nos. 3-6) at the rear of the plot overlooking the meadows of Andersey Island. Although small, they had a degree of architectural flourish, some of which survives in the window dressings. Later in the nineteenth century a semi-detached pair of houses (Nos. 2 and 7) was built on to the front of the southern house, which at some stage was divided and each part incorporated into the new building at the front. Christ’s Hospital sold the freehold of the entire property in 1922. In the late twentieth century the small terraced houses gained northward ground floor extensions; the owners of Nos. 2 and 7 jointly extended their houses to the rear in 1991.

Annotated extract from 1st edition Ordnance Survey map (with thanks to Oxfordshire Library Services)

The first recorded lessees were carpenters and fishermen, but in the eighteenth century it was home to a number of boat-owning families, including the Gleeds and the Crawfords who were related by marriage. One Gleed barge, called ‘The Abingdon’ was very large (130 tons) and had a crew of six. In the nineteenth century the rear terrace was let to labourers and workers in local factories, and outworkers including ‘slop makers’ – of cheap (sloppy) clothes.

Maud Hales Terrace thus survives as a testament to the prosperity of the local barge-owners and as a microcosm of local history since the mid seventeenth century.

Acknowledgement: This article is derived in part from notes left by the late Reverend Michael Hambleton, and the authors thank Mrs Stella Hambleton for access to them.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017

Old Abbey House, Abbey Close

Old Abbey House stands just within the precincts of the former Abingdon Abbey, facing the gateway between St Nicolas’ church and the former hospital of St John (now part of the Guildhall). The house, its gardens and the land beyond – the site of the abbey church – were acquired by Abingdon Town Council in 1923 at the initiative of mayor A E Preston and council staff worked there until April 2014. At the time of writing, its future is uncertain.

Although there seems to have been a house called ‘Mr Stone’s Lodging’ on the site in the sixteenth century, this was timber-framed and there is no obvious fabric of that period in the present building. It is more likely that Old Abbey House was built by wealthy businessman James Smallbone in about 1780, in limestone with brick dressings and a central Classical porch to the front door – see the photograph taken in ca.1900. The low range to the north seems to be contemporary and probably contained the kitchen and servants’ quarters. Internally, decoration in the fashionable Adam style of the period survives in the rooms of the main house.

Edwin Trendell, wine merchant and mayor, rented Old Abbey House in 1847, bought it five years later, and lived there until his death in 1900. He was responsible for creating the various follies in the gardens from discarded medieval stonework from local churches. He made few changes to the house, apart from adding a billiard room at the north-west and the large bay windows to the garden (Fig.1).

Fig.1 Rear view of Old Abbey House with the billiard room built by Trendell to the right (© D Clark)

Its next owner, The Rt Revd James Leslie Randall, bishop of Reading was responsible for a major make-over in 1904-5. He extended the house to the south, altered the entrance (Fig.2), and added further service rooms to the rear, including an improved access to the upper floors of the north range. Parts of the work are in an Arts-and-Crafts style and the decoration is suggestive of his interests. Of particular note is a fireplace with Minton tiles illustrating Arthurian legends (Fig.3) and the welcoming inscription over the doorway – “through this wide opening gate, none come too early none return too late” – an adaptation of some lines from a poem by Alexander Pope and which also were used at Montacute House in Somerset.

Under the care of Abingdon Town Council, Old Abbey House retained most of the evidence for its evolution, and many of the internal features such as fireplaces survive intact and in good condition. It is likely that other features survive in blocked fireplaces, but there are puzzles, such as where the staircase was before 1904, which remain unexplained.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

Trinity Church, Conduit Road

Trinity Church was built in 1873-5 as the new Wesleyan Methodist church. It is on Conduit Road, close to the junction with Park Road and about 160 m east of St Michael’s Church which had recently been built as a daughter church of the parish church of St Helen. Its 38 m Bath stone spire, rising high above St Michael’s simple bellcote, is designed to dominate the view.

An earlier Methodist chapel had been built in 1845 on a narrow site in Ock Street. Thirty years later, the Ock Street chapel and meeting room were too small for the increased congregation but there was no room to expand on the same site. The new Trinity Church had room for a congregation of 600 and its spacious site included separate meeting rooms. John Creemer Clarke, a prominent Methodist layman and local factory owner, is credited with largely financing the church with its meeting rooms and the original manse.

The church is built of roughly-coursed sandstone in an early Gothic style. With its spire, its size and its over-elaborate window tracery, Trinity Church signals the important position in the town that the Methodist community had achieved.

The building was designed by the Reading-based architect W H Woodman.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

Archive for: Unknown