When was your House Built in St Leonard's, Exeter?

 

If you visit a stately home, the guidebook will probably tell you a little bit about the history of its construction.  However, it may not give you an actual date, just enough to suggest a decade or longer.  What about local houses here in St Leonard’s --- when were they built?  For a few in the neighbourhood, there may be records to show when the first residents moved in to a newly completed building. 

However, earlier this year, after writing in the Neighbourhood News about the stones in our local walls, a local resident contacted me.  Could I help him find when his house was built?  Such a request seemed a little unusual; however, I expressed a willingness to co-operate and after a little research and (I admit, some slight guesswork) we assigned a reasonable date, plus or minus 5 years.  Other information had been lost over nearly two centuries.  Maps didn’t help – nobody was producing updated Exeter street maps every few years!  So what is known about houses in St Leonards’s round about the time that Queen Victoria came to the throne?

The suburb of Exeter saw a lot of houses being built in the first half of the nineteenth century (mainly 1820 onwards).  The late Professor Hoskins, living locally in his retirement, an expert on the history of Exeter and Devon, claimed that some of our houses were built for retired naval officers who were unwilling to retire to fashionable Torquay because of the risk of a French attack on the bay.  (The government built the Palmerston Forts around Plymouth in response to such a threat, and a sub-plot in Jules Verne’s French novel “Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea” is about attacking British naval vessels.)  That wasn’t the only reason for Exeter expanding towards Heavitree at that time; wealthy local people wanted to escape the overcrowded city, yet be quite close by.  So our neighbourhood grew and many houses were being built in the years up to 1850.  The house which sparked the investigation was one of the earlier ones. 

According to Professor Hoskins, and another guide to the buildings in Exeter, the opening of substantial brickworks in Polsloe in the 1820s meant that houses in the city were being built with brick from then on.  The grand terraces of Southernhay had been built with brick at the end of the eighteenth century, and it was assumed in the literature that this was a signal for the end of using stone for new buildings.  However, when I spoke to friends living in 19^th century houses, they told me that their houses were stone-built, and covered with stucco (rendering).  One of the houses that I enquired about had stone walls for the lower storeys, and brick ones for the top.  All this suggests that the tradition of building with stone didn’t stop with the widespread availability of bricks; stone was being widely used as a building material for another generation --- for the masons building houses, change did not happen overnight, despite the suggestions in the guidebooks.  Unfortunately, the housebuilders didn’t record how and why they had used particular materials. 

We may never know when the first brick-built houses in St Leonard’s were completed, but If you live in a 19^th century house in the neighbourhood, and know when it was built and what is under the render, please contact me via the editor. 

David Smith

 

A fourth walk along the walls

 

The walls that we have visited so far this year have generally been in very good condition; although there is little to document their construction, one senses that in our neighbourhood, the boundary walls to houses and property were well built.  One local wall which always grates with me is the one opposite the playground at the foot of Salmon Pool Lane.  There, the stones and bricks have been thrown together with no sense of craftsmanship.  The wall is probably one which was reconstructed when the area was developed and old material was used --- but that is not an excuse for something so dreadful!

Enough of grumpiness!  This time, we’ll walk from the village towards the river, starting in Wonford Road.  Just before Radnor Place, an old Heavitree stone wall on the right has had its height neatly increased with bricks.  On the left, the entry to Radnor Place is marked with a protective stone (a “guard stone”) on the corner to keep wheels away from the wall, and then there is a pleasant cob wall with tiled top.  This too is protected from wheels coming too close.

On the wall to the right of Wonford Road there are two Ordnance Survey benchmarks; it is very curious to find two so close together.  The courtyard of the Quadrant on the left has granite gateposts ---and underneath the courtyard, some of the houses still have coal cellars.  After all, you could never expect sacks of coal to be brought through the front door, could you?  Some railings survived the salvage drive of the Second World War, and give us a chance to imagine how the whole wall would have appeared a hundred years ago.  If you divert a short way up the slope of Wonford Road, there’s another very nice tiled wall at the back of Woodhayes. 

The low walls around Mount Radford Crescent seem to have been built for appearance, and give a nice unity to the road.  The left side of Radford Road starts with a wall of mixed fine stones, and then takes us past the archway behind the Quadrant; here there’s a high wall with a great deal of Heavitree Breccia, and this is matched on the right hand side by the retaining wall.

Just before the 20mph sign on the left and the safety railing, turn up the passageway on the left.  This runs between two brick walls.  On one side is an old wall with brick columns at intervals, and on the opposite side is a much more modern wall that bounds the houses of Vine Close and the end of Cedars Road.  Where the passageway turns left, the old wall continues for a short way.  I don’t know when the passageway was created; older maps show a garden with a fountain where the houses now stand. 

Turn into Cedars Road; at some stage, the road’s name changed from Cedar Road; it was built on the back garden of Mount Radford House after the stables and outhouses were demolished.  Despite appearances, the houses were not all built at the same time.  One indication of this gradual development is to be found by looking down as you walk along the pavement.  There are drainage channels crossing the pavement, some with the names of the builder of adjacent properties.  J.M.Soper, Shepherd & Sons, Mitchell & Sons.  Some of these pieces of street furniture are patterned without names, or carry the name of the foundry, Garton and King, who made a great deal of ironwork (drain gratings, manhole covers and other access covers) for the streets of the city (and the company remains in business today).

The end of Cedars Road is opposite the high side wall of St Leonard’s Church; just to the right of the bus shelter the nature of the wall changes.  Here were the footings for the private footbridge from Mount Radford House to the church.  Once again, the wall is made of a wide variety of stones, topped in places with brick.

Now you can choose to walk down to the river between the church boundary and Larkbeare.  Or return to the village; if you go along Cedars Road, use the pavement opposite to the one you used, to spot further designs of drainage channels.  From Cedars Road, a passage leads to the corner of Barnardo Road and past the ornate gateposts of the house which formerly boasted that fountain and garden.  Now (if you are sufficiently curious) walk along West Grove Road, where there are hardware examples labelled Walter Otton --- a name familiar to many Exonians for that family’s remarkable hardware shop that used to be in Fore Street. 

David Smith

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