yes – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

Conduit House, Park Crescent

At the south-east corner of Albert Park, where Park Road and Park Crescent meet, there stands a small, hexagonal stone building. This is the Conduit House.

This unusual building supplied the needs of the citizens of Ock Street at a time when water from other sources was not safe to drink. It stands in an area of plentiful natural springs which fed a cistern in the building, and the water was led thence downhill via stone channels. Its destination was a fountain in Ock Street.

It is not known when the Conduit House was built. It belonged to Abingdon Abbey at the time of the Abbey’s dissolution in 1538, and then it passed to the Crown. In 1553 it, and the surrounding land, passed to the local charity, Christ’s Hospital. It is mentioned in the Amyce survey of Abingdon of 1554.

In the eighteenth century, this system for supplying relatively clean water to Ock Street was refurbished and provided with a new fountain through the initiative of leading Abingdon townsmen. It was in use until 1875, when a mains water supply was installed for the whole town. The fountain was moved from Ock Street to Conduit Road in the 1940s and it can still be seen in the wall of Tomkins’ Almshouses.

The Conduit House itself is no longer in use.

It is not open to the public.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

© AAAHS and contributors 2013

28 East St Helen Street, Unicorn House

No.28 is one of the largest and most impressive houses in East St Helen Street. A building on the plot was identified in Amyce’s 1554 survey but nothing of that building survives today. The primary phase of the present house is from 1616-17. It is on two floors with an attic and cellar and purpose-built for commercial use, possibly as an inn. It probably had four large gables facing the street. It was bought in 1679 by Thomas Medlycott, recorder of Abingdon and future MP, who converted it into a dwelling house, probably removing the gables and putting in sash windows. The name ‘Unicorn House’ is modern. It was thought to have been the name of an inn that Medlycott bought and converted it into a house, but there is no record of a Unicorn Inn on this site.

A plaque commemorates the visit to the house by William of Orange in 1688 on his way to London to claim the English throne.

From the early eighteenth century are the doorcase, dining room panelling and staircase. Later changes have been few – additional panelling in the front hall is probably late nineteenth-century, while documented alterations in 1971 were relatively minor in scope.

The house is private property and not open to the public.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

60 East St Helen St, The Malthouse

The present building is largely a reconstruction of the early twentieth century by local architect Harry Redfern (1861-1950) as business premises for lawyer Charles Alfred Pryce. Apart from a fragment of a two-light window with Perpendicular tracery all the openings in the 1895 photograph have been blocked in and all the present openings are modern.

The Malthouse does however include elements of the medieval dyehouse noted in Amyce’s 1554 survey of Abingdon. In the mid-seventeenth century the premises were used for malting, and it is possible that the north wing (noted as a maltings in 1876) dates from this time. The adjacent brick building seems eighteenth-century in date, and at some stage a datestone of 1748 was set into it, probably by the Tomkins family, prominent Baptists and maltsters in Abingdon. In the nineteenth century the Copeland family firm continued the malting business. The remodelling in 1900 is an interesting example of the vernacular revival, with an open hall created where none existed before.

No.60 is currently the offices of West Waddy ADP, architects and town planners.

See Glossary for explanations of technical terms.

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