19th Century - Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Former Congregational Church, The Square

This self-confident, classical-fronted building on The Square is the former Congregational Church. It marked the prominence of the local Congregational community when it was built in 1862 with seats for six hundred adult worshippers. It was designed by the local architect J S Dodd. The front, with its pediment and giant pilasters, is finished in ashlar stone. The side walls, not visible from the street, are brick.

The original Congregational or Independent meeting house had been built in 1700 as a modest, plain structure on a site hidden behind the street frontage. In 1861 the land immediately in front of the old building was purchased as the site for the new chapel. When this was built, the old meeting house was adapted to become a church annex with a vestry and rooms for Sunday School classes. It is still part of the church building today.

In 1979 the congregation united with Trinity Methodist Church. The Church building remained empty until in 1987 when it was sold and converted into offices. It became a restaurant in 2008.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

Former County Police Station in 2001. The Police Station is on the right.

Former County Police Station, Bridge Street

About to be remodelled at the time of writing as part of the Old Gaol development, the former County Police Station dominates the west side of Bridge Street. It was built in 1856-7 and the architect was J B Clacy. When built, it had domestic accommodation for a superintendent and a sergeant, and stables to the rear for them to use when visiting outposts elsewhere in the county. The building to the left in a very similar style replaced a former court room, but this was demolished in 2011 to make a new entrance to the Old Gaol.

Inside the police station, there was a rabbit-warren of rooms, and all the domestic areas had been converted to offices by 1999 when it closed. However, it did have a suite of three cells deep inside. It is unlikely that these will survive the redevelopment.

The building is currently awaiting redevelopment and is not open to the public.

Click here for a PDF with further details.

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

The Old Anchor in 2010, with part of the new almshouses just visible on the left.

The Old Anchor, St Helen’s Wharf

The Old Anchor Inn on its present site can be dated to precisely 30 August 1884 when its license was first granted. Prior to this it had operated over the road on a site right on the river that it shared with an almshouse. The original Old Anchor and the almshouse were moved to new sites when Christ’s Hospital, which owned the whole area and still does, redeveloped St Helen’s Wharf in 1884.

The three attached houses that had stood on the present site were remodeled to create the new Old Anchor Inn plus a separate dwelling that was incorporated in the same building. At the rear of the present building, and not accessible to the public, is a seventeenth-century timber-framed range that formed part of the original three houses. The redevelopment also included new almshouses next to the new inn. They replaced an old workshop that was demolished to make way for them.

The present Old Anchor has two doorways. Initially only the right hand door (1 St Helen’s Wharf) led to the public house; the left hand door (No. 2) belonged to the separate dwelling. This was later incorporated into the public house.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013 revised 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.

St Michael's from the north-west in 2013

St Michael and All Angels Church, Park Road

St Michael’s was built in 1864-7 on Park Road, just south of the newly created Albert Park. Christ’s Hospital, the main town charity which owned what was then an open field north of Ock Street, had started to develop it for housing.

The new church was built through the efforts of the Reverend Nathaniel Dodson, the indefatigable vicar of St Helen’s and rector of St Nicolas’ from 1824 until a short time before his death in 1867.

The new St Michael’s, which had space for 650 worshippers, was needed to cater for those who lived at the western end of the town and were furthest from the town centre churches of St Helen and St Nicolas. Many of them lived and worked in the crowded courts on Ock Street. St Michael’s would later serve as the local church for the new housing as it developed.

The church was designed by George Gilbert Scott, the most prominent British architect of the time. Scott created a restrained and dignified building. It is in a simple gothic style with a tall west bellcote, and is built of roughly-coursed rubble stone.

Although fundraising for the new church had started in 1860 some funds were still lacking when the structure was completed, and the fittings in place for the consecration service were sparse: second-hand pews, a borrowed harmonium, no fixed lighting, and no heating. It took a combination of donations and the efforts of the congregation over the next few decades to provide lighting, heating, an organ, stained glass, and other fittings including a reredos of 1878 by Edwin Dolby and an altar of 1911 by Harry Redfern, both of them well known local architects. A church room was added in 1968 and there was a major refurbishment and reordering in 2008.

Initially, St Michael’s would have followed the same practices as St Helen’s and St Nicolas’ as it was served by the same clergy, and its baptism registers show that its congregation was largely from the surrounding neighbourhood. Today, and it seems since the 1920s, it is at the high church end of the Anglican spectrum and its congregation comes from all over Abingdon.

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.