Marsworth, Buckinghamshire

 

Changing roles

To the traveller along the Lower Icknield Way, north of Tring, the village of Marsworth seems unimpressive, somewhere to pass by quickly perhaps, on the way to Dunstable. But it’s more interesting than that, because the village is set at a junction of the Grand Union (formerly Grand Junction) Canal, and was once an important transport hub. Nearby are the large Tring Reservoirs, built to supply water to the canal – Tring was the summit of the navigation and this stretch was vulnerable to running dry as locks shifted huge volumes of water. In addition, numerous cottages were built in the village of Marsworth to house those working on the canal and in related businesses.

One such related business was providing refreshment for barge workers – pubs were a familiar canalside feature and many also incoporated shops where the barge people could buy provisions. As I looked down at the waterway from the bridge at the end Vicarage Lane in Marsworth, I admired the charming thatched cottage in my photograph. I wondered whether it had once been such a pub, although I had my doubts because there’s another pub nearby on the lane, the Red Lion, which was covered in scaffolding on the day I was there, but still very much open for business.

The house by the canal is thatched and built mainly of white-painted brick. One end is weatherboarded. It’s said to be 17th-century in origin, although modified in the 19th century. At that time, and for much of the 20th century, it was indeed a pub, the Ship Inn. Later in the 20th century it was a shop, and now it’s a house (available as an Airbnb, according to some sources. So I was right about its role and its relation to the canal. In the 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th, it must have thrived by quenching the thirsts of large numbers of barge workers. When the canal’s use declined between the two World Wars, it found other roles. Now apparently, having been part of a transport infrastructure that was so important to manufacturing industry, it serves a very different business, tourism. Such is the fate of so many historic buildings – the fortunate ones find a new use, and are preserved.