Needham Market, Suffolk

House move

As I approached Needham Market on my Suffolk trip late last year, this house caught my eye and once I’d got my bearings I went back to have a look at it. With its big thatched roof and squarish proportions it reminded me of certain toll houses, built to act as landmarks and to be easily spotted on the road. Except that this house was set back from the road, not at all a good position for a toll house. So I supposed it was probably simply a cottage orné, an example of that rustic and decorative kind of house that became popular in the 18th and 19th centuries.

However, the history of what is now called the Mustard Pot is not quite as simple as that. It turns out that it was built as a toll house, and the gatekeeper must have sheltered under the generous eaves hundreds of times when it was pouring with rain. But when it fulfilled this function, it was not on its current site. It originally stood at Brockford, not far from Mendlesham, by the road that is now the A140. When the A140 was widened in 1972, the house was threatened with demolition, so a Mr Sniechowski of Ipswich, who thought it was worth preserving, had it taken down and moved to Needham Market.*

The roof was removed in one piece – thatch, timbers and all – put on a trailer and driven, very slowly, to the new site. Then the walls were dismantled – they are timber-framed structures beneath the external plaster – taken to the new site and reassembled. The original idea was for the building to be used by fishermen who were angling at the nearby Needham Lake, but Mr Sniechowski died soon after the house’s re-erection and apparently this idea was not taken up. The building served as a dwelling before being taken over by a veterinary practice, which is still its use today. Moving entire houses is a very unusual practice in the UK, most often undertaken by the various open-air museums whose mission it is to preserve unused historic buildings. It’s good that Mr Sniechowski had the vision to move this small house, ensuring the survival of a useful and picturesque building.

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* My thanks to the Stowe Veterinary Centre’s website for information about this unusual house move.

Devizes, Wiltshire

When is a castle not a castle?

...When it’s a toll house.

This small building was erected some time in the mid-19th century, probably the 1840s, to collect tolls on a turnpike road form Devizes to Chippenham. The building is all of a piece, with stone walls, windows with dripstones, and a parapet with battlements that remind one of a castle. But there are three distinct sections. The largest part, to the left in the photograph, would have provided residential rooms for the toll-collector, whose accommodation also took up much of the middle, octagonal, section. However the octagonal shape of this part was also useful for work, because the windows in the canted walls have good views of approaching traffic on either side – the building is actually at a fork in the road the forms the meeting place of the modern A361 (to Trowbridge) and A342 (to Chippenham). Toll houses of this period were often octagonal and the resulting angles of view were often cited as the reason for this unusual shape. Another reason could be the very distinctiveness – an octagonal building stands out on the road.

The third, right-hand, section of the house is a porch, the door of which is now blocked because an entrance on the end is more convenient these days. Another doorway in the side has been blocked too, and the space decorated with a trompe l’oeil image of a half-open door – you’d not want to step out of it these days, into the path of a passing bus. The porch afforded some shelter for the toll-collector on rainy or cold days. In the road, there would have been a gate and, when the toll-collector saw traffic approaching, he could lurk here in the dry until whatever it was – coach, carriage, cart, horse rider, pedestrian – was at the gate. He could then come out, collect the traveller’s money, and open the gate. Nowadays this is a busy stretch of road – getting a picture of the building without any cars, lorries or buses in front of it entailed some patience. Although it has been altered and now seems rather marooned between the two main roads, this castellated building still offers a glimpse of a past way of life.