Exterior only - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

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

The courtyard and clock tower to the east of the house in 2007

22-28 Ock Street, The Clock House

The Tomkins family were wealthy maltsters during the eighteenth century and built Abingdon’s three grandest houses, Stratton House in Bath Street, The Clock House in Ock Street and Twickenham House in East St Helen Street.

The Clock House dates from the 1720s. It was probably designed by Samuel Westbrook, a local builder, and it was built for Benjamin Tomkins and his wife Sarah. Their initials, BTS, are carved into the brickwork above the outermost first floor windows. The house is built entirely of brick. The unusual paired central front doors seem to be original but it is not known why this arrangement was chosen.

The open courtyard with its central clock tower is to the east of the house and was added some 30 years later. It included a stable and a service block, and was designed by Robert Taylor who became a leading architect of his time. The extension of the house into the courtyard is a later addition.

The Clock House continued to be lived in by members of the Tomkins family until 1850 when it was sold by auction and divided up.

In subsequent years different parts of the property were used as dwellings, and by a variety of businesses and organisations. The Mechanics Institute moved into the left wing of the courtyard in 1857. It was succeeded in 1881 by The Beaconsfield Working Men’s Conservative Club. The added oriel window on the Ock Street face of the left wing dates from this time. It is decorated with relief portraits of three late nineteenth century Conservative statesmen including Lord Beaconsfield (Benjamin Disraeli).

The whole complex was converted into offices in the mid-1980s.

The courtyard and out-buildings are separately listed at grade II (reference nos. 1048864; 1199729; 1283229; 1368303).

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

54 Ock Street

From 1937 to 2008, 54 Ock Street and the subsidiary buildings behind it housed the printing works of Leach’s the Printers. Before that, from 1901, it was the ‘Brooklyn Works’, making mineral waters, sweets and toffee, especially ‘Barnett’s Lemon Drops’ which were local favourites.

From 1675 until 1859 or later, the sites of Nos. 52 and 54 Ock Street were invariably held by the same lessee, although No. 52 was owned by the charity of Christ’s Hospital and No. 54 by the Abingdon Corporation (town council). The tenants included the clockmaker and borough chamberlain Joseph Norris, and a wealthy bachelor, George Hawkins, who indulged his intellectual interests with books and a large collection of scientific instruments.

The present building at No. 54 is of brick, with stone lintels to the front door and ground-floor windows. When it was erected is unknown, but it was certainly occupied by George Hawkins at his death in 1820. It was then acquired by William Faulkner who added the outbuildings and turned it into an industrial site.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

86-92 Ock Street

These three-storey houses were built soon after 1823 in a Corporation initiative that was unusual for the time. Normally, leases were automatically renewed at rates that had not changed for two hundred years, and leaseholders were free to use the sites as they wished. Here, several leases that had fallen in were taken in hand and the plot boundaries reorganised. The site was cleared, and new leases issued to the highest bidders.

Conditions were set for the stretch fronting Ock Street. New houses were to be built within the year; they were to be of uniform construction, brick-built, and with sash windows. They were to be at least 21 feet high to the roof plate, and at least 15 feet deep (6.3 m and 4.5 m). They should not be of worse appearance than ‘those lately built by Robert Stiles in the same street’.

The obvious intention was to build houses for the more affluent among the working class, and it would seem that the Corporation was concerned to give the impression, to anyone who did not penetrate too far behind the main streets, of a prosperous and well-governed town.

Part of the interest to the leaseholders, who paid heavily for their new privilege, was that they could now develop the land behind the street, going down to the field known as the Thistlecroft. By 1838, this had become a row of slum houses known as Brooker’s Yard.

Today, Brooker’s Yard and the Thistlecroft have become the Meadowside estate.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

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.

Fig.2 Entrance hall and staircase
Guinevere (© D Clark)

Fig.3 Minton tile illustrating Queen
Guinevere (© D Clark)

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.

© AAAHS and contributors 2014

Old Gaol, Bridge Street

The late eighteenth century was a period when prisons and prison building were prominent in public debate. Criminals could no longer be transported to America, and existing gaols were understood to be inhumane and unsatisfactory. The Berkshire magistrates, who, in their Quarter Sessions, governed the county before the coming of county councils, built a new gaol in Reading, but delayed for some twenty years before replacing the old facilities in Abingdon.

The initiative seems to have come from an Abingdon lawyer, Benjamin Morland, who was a secondary burgess in the Abingdon Corporation and also clerk to the Quarter Sessions. He had a financial interest, together with some of his clients, in the dilapidated White Hart inn at the entrance to Abingdon Bridge. An agreement was reached in 1803 between the Corporation and the magistrates that the latter would acquire the White Hart for £500, buy out the leaseholders for a further £800, and build a new gaol while also widening and paving the road outside. It was Morland, as their clerk and executive officer, who organised the construction, drawing the work out over many years as money became available.

The Old Gaol – Architect’s drawing, 1804Reproduced by permission of the Berkshire Record Office

Architects’ drawings were approved in 1804. They are not signed, but an early description names the architect as the multi-skilled Daniel Harris, who was also a general building contractor as well as governor of the gaol in Oxford. Harris was the foremost of several contractors that Morland employed. A better-known architect, Jeffrey Wyatt, had some involvement, but this was only in 1812 when the first stage of building was complete and Harris was temporarily incapacitated by mental illness.

View of the New Prison at Abingdon, Berks. H. Meyer after William Watkin Waite. Coloured Aquatint.
(Private Collection)

There is a persistent tradition that the gaol was built by French prisoners of war, but this is not correct. Apart from officers on parole, there were no French prisoners closer to Abingdon than Portsmouth or Bristol, and they were never employed outside their quarters. What is much more likely, although there is no direct evidence, is that Harris used his own prisoners from the Oxford gaol, as he certainly did in building Osney lock on the Thames in 1787 and probably at the Pinkhill and Godstow locks also.

The Old Gaol –architect’s drawing, 1804, showing the three-wing radial design.
Reproduced by permission of the Berkshire Record Office

The radial design of the gaol was modern for its time, allowing the segregation of different classes of prisoners. At ground floor level, the angle between the front wings was taken up by a large court room, so that prisoners would not need to be escorted through the streets to and from their trials. But as time passed, opinion moved towards what became known as the separate system, where prisoners were kept rigorously apart from each other and had no human contact except with the prison chaplain and staff. The magistrates built a large new facility in Reading designed for these conditions. It was operating by 1844, and was amply big enough for all the county’s needs.

There followed a political conflict that split the Quarter Sessions for many years. A pressure group was led by William Merry, a fanatical believer in the principle of segregation, and by Henry Court, who was appalled by the waste of money represented by having two separate facilities in the county, both grossly underused. They were supported by the magistrates from the southern and eastern parts of the county for whom having to travel to Abingdon for sessions was an imposition. Abingdon wanted to keep the gaol for the money brought into the town by the sessions and assizes that would cease to be held there if it were to close. But towns were not represented in the county Quarter Sessions, and Abingdon’s case had to be made indirectly by lobbying.

By the 1860s, the government’s prison inspectorate was reporting that the Abingdon gaol was unfit for purpose. Cells now needed heating and artificial ventilation, which could not be retrofitted. Abingdon businessmen were defiant. In 1867 “one hundred of the inhabitants” of Abingdon passed a resolution to “resist the aggression of the County in their attempt to procure the abolition of Abingdon Gaol.” The Abingdon council went expensively to court, citing the 1803 agreement in an attempt to force the magistrates to rebuild the gaol to the latest standards. Their case was hopeless, and the gaol was finally closed in 1868.

The Abingdon gaol had been in its time a prestige building, but no one had ever considered it beautiful. Its ugliness had been cited against it in at least one of the Quarter Sessions debates. But demolition would cost money, which no one seems to have seriously considered spending. For many years it functioned as a grain store. Some of its subsidiary buildings had become slum dwellings and were demolished in the 1930s. During the 1970s it was partially rebuilt as a leisure centre. At the time of writing (2016) it is at the centre of a large residential development and has been converted into flats.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

Organ Blowing Chamber, St Helen’s Churchyard

The organ blowing chamber in St Helen’s churchyard, Abingdon, is an excellent example of a little-known building type. Air for church organs was first supplied by means of hand-pumped bellows, but by the twentieth century electric air pumps were becoming common. However, they were often noisy and so were usually sited outside the church. The design and location of the chamber at St Helen’s was the result of discussion and compromise in the summer of 1927, when a new organ was being installed. The architects were J G T West & Son of Abingdon, who offered the church authorities a selection of designs, and the original choice was for a stone building at the north-east of the churchyard near the gateway. As built, however, the chamber lies between the church and the nearby Brick Alley almshouses of 1718, and its final design so closely echoes that of the almshouses that when ‘listed’ it was described as an ancillary building to the almshouses. That craftsmen could be found in 1927 to carry out the gauged brickwork and fine pointing seen in the blowing chamber is indeed remarkable and the chamber continues today in its original function, while also housing the church’s central heating boilers.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

3 Stert Street

This house stands on the east side of the street and next door but one to St Nicolas’ Church. It is a double-fronted, timber-framed building dating from about 1470.

The house was built by Abingdon Abbey on land it owned running north from St Nicolas’ between the Abbey wall and the River Stert. The Stert, which flows from north to south, is now in a culvert under the pavement outside the house.

When the building was renovated in the twentieth century, the original overhanging jetty at the front was restored and an extension was added to the back of the old house, making it a hybrid of some historical interest.

At the same time the remains of a wall painting of geometric design were discovered in the north bedroom on the first floor. They can still be seen faintly on the timbers.

For much of its later history the building was a public house, variously called the Golden Cross and the Butchers’ Arms. After the Abbey was dissolved in the sixteenth century, the freehold belonged first to the Crown and then to the Borough Council, until it passed into private ownership in the mid-nineteenth century. The 1921 photograph (above) was taken after it ceased to be a pub; the group in the doorway are members of the Lewis and Higgs families.

It is a private house and not open to the public.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

52 Stert Street, The Knowl

This striking house is even more complex than it appears. It is broadly T-shaped in plan, with the leg of the T having a double-jettied gable on Stert Street. Its main façade of five bays faces south and features a door-case with a segmental pediment supported by pilasters and a frieze with coloured trophies (the initials A & R were also visible in the past). This façade is an eighteenth-century refronting of an earlier building – the tree-ring dates for a pair of rafters were in the range 1597-1611. But this earlier building was itself an extension of something even earlier, probably sixteenth-century, parts of which survive inside. When the building was extended, the barge-boards from the former gable were reused as rafters in the new roof.

At the rear of the house is a further wing to the north, and in the angle between this and the main range is a small doorway with a Tudor arched head. Behind this in the wing is an early eighteenth-century staircase.

To the south, and butted against the main range is the former stable-block, with a painted brick front and casement windows. A photograph by Henry Taunt shows the southern end of the block as a domestic building with a tall gable facing east and a large Venetian window below. As recently as 1951 there was a door and a carriage door facing the courtyard, but by the late twentieth century the southern part had been demolished.

Very little is known about the early history of the Knowl, but it was one of the three places in Abingdon where Royal Proclamations were read. In more recent times its most notable resident was Abingdon architect J G T (Timothy) West. In 1891 he was living there aged 29 with his wife Louisa (aged 30) and sons aged 3 and 5 – and in Hooke’s Directory for 1893 the house is called ‘The Knoll’. It appears as ‘The Knowl’ from 1903 onwards. West lived and ran his business there until the early 1930s. Another long-standing owner was Pope & Company (Insurance) Ltd., from 1953 to 1987-8, when it became a guest house. The inside front cover of Agnes Baker’s book on the Historic Streets of Abingdon (1957) has a full-page advertisement for the company with a photograph of the house at that time. This, and the earlier photograph by Henry Taunt, shows an oriel window in the Stert Street overhang. This was removed in the 1960s when it was damaged by tall vehicles.

The stable block was occupied by Aldworth’s, engineers and machinists from before 1893 to around 1915 and until the 1970s it was the Co-operative Society’s butcher’s shop.

Tomkins Almshouses, Ock Street

Benjamin Tomkins was a rich maltster in Abingdon and a staunch Baptist. In 1732 he left £1600 in his will as the endowment for an almshouse for ‘four Poor Men and four Poor Women for Ever’. He also specified the layout, and the builders were probably the local men Samuel Westbrook and Charles Etty. As well as being almost exactly as built in 1733, the Tomkins almshouses are one of the few buildings in Abingdon that make an architectural statement. The almshouses were conveyed to Christ’s Hospital in 1987.

The accommodation (see map) was arranged in two rows facing each other across a courtyard, and each resident had two rooms, each 12ft square. Although there are now slight differences between the units, their basic layout is the same – a central doorway opens into the living room, which had a corner fireplace; the other room was the bedroom. The facilities were modernised in the 1950s with the inclusion of kitchen units in the living room and a toilet and shower room in the bedroom. In 2002 there were further rearrangements and upgradings.

The central courtyard is strictly symmetrical and each side has a crenellated centrepiece with a taller doorway than those to the individual units. These led to the pump and the toilet. At the far end is a ‘gatehouse’ leading to a small garden. Tomkins’ will specified that each resident should have a plot – presumably to grow vegetables – but over the years it has become a communal area for rest and relaxation.

We do not know who designed the almshouses. Most examples of this tight courtyard plan are some distance from Abingdon, for example Ford’s Hospital in Coventry (around 1509) and the Trinity Almshouses in Salisbury (founded 1379 but rebuilt in 1702). The local example at Lyford is more open but may have been the model.

The architectural details, however, were not specified in the will. The shaped gables are typical of ‘artisan mannerism’, and the battlements are an early example of the ‘castle style’ of the early Gothic revival. The frontispiece at the end of the courtyard is in concept a triumphal arch. The meaning of this is multi-layered. Clearly it says that the charity of the Baptists was as great as that of the Anglican elite who supported Christ’s Hospital, but its use of eclectic architectural features and commemorative details convey the message that while Tomkins was successful and triumphant in life, he was also triumphant in death ‘for Ever’ through his endowment.

We know the names of the residents and something of the arrangements there in the nineteenth century from the available censuses. For example in 1901 three of the residents had other family members staying with them on census night. While these may have been casual visitors, some may have been live-in carers for their relatives. Later in the century it seems that couples were living there together.

Life in the almshouses has in some ways changed dramatically since 1733, with modern facilities and heating supplied from a central boiler, yet if Benjamin Tomkins were to return today he would recognise many features of his foundation. The residents are largely self-sufficient, yet they share tasks and are very much a community.