Cirencester, Gloucestershire

Investment product (2)

I first came across the word ‘tontine’ (see previous post) when I saw this building. It’s in the Cotswold town of Cirencester on the wonderful Cecily Hill, one of the most beautiful streets in the town. Cecily Hill is a wide street, full of houses – Georgian here, Regency Gothick there, Cotswold vernacular elsewhere – in the local creamy stone, and ends in iron gates that lead into the grounds of Cirencester Park and the longest avenue of trees in England. Tontine Buildings is a row of houses, and it’s said that Earl Bathurst ‘won’ it as the last surviving investor.

It’s a very plain and simple building, a terrace of ten small houses with a flat, cliff-like frontage topped by a very retrained – some might even say mean – cornice. But I like its restraint, and the elegant touches, such as the curved central carriage arch and the oval cartouche containing the name, that give the row an air of quality. Not the most ornate building on Cecily Hill, then, but a worthy complement to the more showy houses on the street. And a fitting backdrop to the most impressive collection of planters in the town.

Stourport-on-Severn, Worcestershire

Investment product (1)

To Stourport-on-Severn, to admire the locks, basins, bridges, and waterside buildings of one of England’s most fascinating canal towns. But as usual, my eye was caught by something I didn’t quite expect. This building is called The Tontine. The central part was an inn, and the flanking portions contain houses. There are more houses in the wings, which extend out from the back of the building to give the whole thing a plan like an enormous capital E. It was built in the 1770s, although the porch was added about 100 years later. The whole building is being redeveloped as houses, and is festooned with ‘For Sale’ signs. Its red brick and neat windows look well, and the rooms at the front enjoy views across the lawn to the River Severn.

But why was it called ‘The Tontine’? A tontine was what today might be called, to use a kind of language I usually avoid, an ‘investment product’. As I understand it, it worked like this. A group of shareholders clubbed together to buy an investment, such as a property, and shared the income. But there was a twist: the shareholders couldn’t sell their shares, and when they died, their shares passed to the other shareholders. The last surviving shareholder struck gold, inheriting the entire scheme. One presumes that the newly developed houses in the building are being sold with a more conventional tenure arrangement.