Pershore, Worcestershire

Judge’s lodgings

Further along Bridge Street, Pershore from the town house in my previous post is one with more pretensions to grandeur. Instead of the multitude of small sashes of its near neighbour, Perrott House shows off with a smaller number of large windows. There’s a big Venetian window in the middle of the first floor, with canted bays on either side. The ground-floor canted bays, with their arched front openings, echo the proportions of the Venetian window on the floor above, as does the doorway, which has a smaller fanlight than the one at number 3, but one that makes up for that with a strong pattern of glazing bars and chunky voussoirs around the arch.

Perrott House, it struck me as I looked at it, was clearly built for someone who either wanted to make their mark or who’d made their mark already – the latter, as it turns out, for the owner was Judge George Perrott, Baron of the Exchequer, who sat in courts of equity in the second half of the 18th century. No doubt like other residents of Bridge Street, he must have made good use of Worcestershire’s improved transport links to the capital. His architect (it’s not known who it was) provided the judge with an impressive house, albeit with a facade made up of standard motifs (Venetian windows, quoins, pediment, and so on) of Georgian architecture. It’s what you’d expect in the house of a rich and prominent person in the 1770s living in a wealthy town in the provinces. I’d love to see inside, because we’re told* that the interior, with its fine Adam-style stucco work and marble fireplaces, was a cut above the provincial norm and was probably done by good London craftsmen. Those transport links, it seems, paid off.

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* See for example the Worcestershire volume of Pevsner; the listing text for the house even speculates that Robert Adam may have been the architect.