A walk along the walls (part 7)

 

First, a correction to the last issue.  I wrote that Delabole slate would have come from Dartmoor.  Try as you might, you won’t find much slate on the moor.  Some slate is found near Lydford, but that is not a very big source.  Delabole slate comes from Cornwall!  So moving it to Exeter in the first half of the 19^th century meant shipping it from Port Gaverne on the north Cornish coast after it had been hauled the six miles from the quarry. (There is a short history of the mine online.)  Now, while I am in a repentant mood, I have repeatedly written of “Heavitree” stone or breccia; to be accurate, I should mention that around the city, most of the sandstone blocks came from Heavitree/Wonford, while others from quarries in Whipton and Exminster.  Apologies to those localities.

 I hope that you haven’t been too busy over Christmas and the New Year to enjoy seeing “things” around St Leonard’s.  These articles have concentrated on the walls along our local roads, with occasional references to other “things” that you might notice.  If another writer took you by the hand, for a walk around our neighbourhood, they might point out other “things”.  Now there’s a challenge to future contributors!

For this excursion, start by the pedestrian crossing in the village.  Apart from the short block of shops opposite the Mount Radford, all the shops are on one side of the road.  Apparently, there was a covenant on the land that prohibited any commercial buildings apart from a dairy (which became that short block of shops).  Besides being a divider between shops and houses, the road marks the boundary between the church parishes of St Matthew and St Leonard.  It is generally agreed that this was a Roman road originally.  Now, walk towards Denmark Road. 

The front garden walls on the left side of the road are varied with brick and stone; the two pairs of white fluted gateposts are interesting.  They feature as a listed building, (yes, a Building!) noted for their Doric style, found in the Parthenon in Athens and on several historic buildings around Britain … but not many in Exeter.  Further down there is another wall with railings replacing those lost to World War 2 metal collections.

Turn into Denmark Road and the walls of the almshouses on the left are mainly Heavitree stone, but with an interesting tapered top.  There is a short stretch of Heavitree stone behind the gardens of the almshouses.  On the right, the façade is of glazed brick with the detail picked out in plain brickwork; generally, the components are reversed, glazed bricks for detail.  The semi-detached houses beyond share a simple stone wall, with a decorated brick gatepost.  However, opposite, a gatepost topped with a stone pyramid marks the end of a Heavitree stone wall between the properties.  It’s a legacy of the time in the 19^th century when this area was orchards and nurseries bounded by field walls.  Presumably, long ago, the builder or owner decided that the roadside deserved an ornate feature, partially concealing the wall. 

Most of the block of land on the right beyond Spicer Road is the grounds of the Maynard School; the exception is the corner plot, the vicarage for St Matthew’s church.  As you walk along Denmark Road, there is a change in the brickwork of the wall, which shows the extent of the vicarage garden.  Walk a little further, and it changes again. Why?  When the school was established, there was an orchard between the school grounds and the vicarage.  The central brickwork marks the extent of this smallholding or nursery.  (As the entrance to the nursery was from Denmark Road, and there is no sign of it in the wall, I assume that all the brickwork dates from after the sale of the grounds to the school.  Does anyone know?)

Opposite, the grounds of Crossley House were left undeveloped after its neighbours were built, which accounts for the irregular boundary on the right-hand side.  The corner plot was also a nursery and was developed after the other buildings in Denmark Road.  The house took the name “Athelstan House” from a legend that the land was fortified by King Athelstan (king 925-940AD) who was (probably) a benefactor of the people of Exeter.  At the crossroads, the Livery Dole Martyrs’ Memorial was erected in 1909 in memory of the protestant martyrs, Thomas Benet and Agnes Prest.  If you have never stopped to look at the plaques around the base, they reveal an aspect of the history of this spot.

The area bounded by Barnfield Road and Denmark Road ahead of you was one of the nurseries belonging to the Sclater family, who owned a great deal of land around the city in the 19^th century.  They had glasshouses in the area between Barnfield Hill and Heavitree Road.

Finally, walk towards Western Way; the terrace on the right is faced with stone, and the front walls match.  Supposedly, some of this fine stone came from the Georgian bridge across the Exe.

And now I leave you to return, to look out for other “things”

 

When was your house built? --- part 3

Heavitree stone gets everywhere!  It is clear that behind the stuccoed walls of early and mid 19^th century houses in St Leonard’s, there are walls built of stone from the Heavitree quarries.  In response to the items that appeared in the last two issues, I learnt of an unusual detail about one of these.  There were (formerly) ways that when land was sold for building, there could be specific rules about what could or could not be built --- imposed by the vendor, not, as today, by the planning authority.  In this case, for a house being built in the 1830s in a plot adjacent to an existing garden and house, the instructions were clear:  the (new) house was to be built in Heavitree stone, with Delabole slate for the roof and the best Norwegian pine for any woodwork.  A further couple of stipulations were that the vendor must be allowed to grow his apricots on his side of the wall, and that no washing was to be hung out to dry in the front garden of the new house!

I wonder how anyone checked that the slate really had come from the Delabole quarries in Cornwall; it must have come some of the way by horse and cart.  The pine would have come along Exeter Canal to merchants on the quay.  How productive was the apricot tree?

 And in a further development, particulars for a recent house sale in St Leonard's Road explicitly mentioned that the house was built in 1832.  

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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