An Architectural Miscellany
Bingham has no really architecturally
impressive buildings, but there are many interesting details that
can catch the eye of the observer willing to walk slowly or just
stand and stare at some of Bingham’s older buildings. Look
out for old barns, extensions
and alterations, different brickwork bonds
and patterns, architectural decoration,
boot scrapers, reminders of horses,
windows, doorways,
dentils, roofs, chimneys
and water pumps.
This page offers a few interesting cameos
to prompt you to explore - you will find others! Nothing is unique
or spectacularly arresting - but there are many pleasing features
to be seen as you stroll around the older parts of the town. Photographs
of many of these may be seen by clicking on the appropriate blue
underlines; uncredited photos are by Joan Taylor, Robin Aldworth,
Geoff Ashton and Margaret Sibley.
Barns
Bingham was pre-eminently a farming community and there are many
substantial remains of the buildings associated with those times.
The farmhouses tend to be identified in the descriptions elsewhere
on the web site. Here we draw attention to some of the more interesting
barns and their modern uses.
Newgate Street has two dated barns, each associated with old farmhouses.
One
at number 10 (once part Gillott’s farm at no 8) has a rudimentary
1817
picked out by single vitrified headers. The door is replicated at
the rear and the floor is paved with stone flags. The hinges are
set in carved
stone bearers.
Behind the barn in the garden of number 10 is an old
stable with a barred unglazed window, to allow ventilation,
typical of the 18th Century or earlier . Another barn
at number 20 has a similar window and an ‘1862’
dated brick within a diamond
of vitrified bricks.
Bingham has several converted barns.
Number 53
Long Acre was part of the Shelford Estate timber yard and was
converted for residential use by the present owners in 1973/4. The
stable and barn at Holme
Lodge, Long Acre East, has been recently converted to a games
room, but retains some of the original exterior and interior features.
Inside there is what seems to have been living accommodation for
a groom. A barn
in the grounds of Carnarvon Primary School once stood alone in a
field at the end of the track alongside Crow Close, before the development
of the estate. It has a stone
dated 1878 with the builder’s or (more likely) the owner’s
initials ‘JW’. Could this have been John Wall, whose
family had been cottagers in Long Acre East, where the Gables stands
now, for at least 60 years prior to that time?
The pig
sties and barn
attached to 21 Long Acre, one of Bingham’s oldest houses,
were converted in 1994 to form the Buttercross
Veterinary Centre, some of which is actually cunningly disguised
new build! Much of the original fenestration, dove holes, bar doorways
and air gaps remain. The barn attached to the Rosary
in East Street is now the centre’s dining room; the blocked
barn door reveals hinges set in stone bearers, similar to the barn
at 10 Newgate Street. The old
forge on Long Acre is now a dentists’ surgery and the
barn-cum-dovecote on Warner’s Field, Long Acre is the headquarters
of the Bowls
Club.
Finally, in this selection, note the barn-like building now part
of the DIY shop in Market
Street. The hayloft door at first floor level suggests this
was a stable, but the ground floor doorway seems too large and elaborate.
Professional building historians note the quality brickwork which
seems to belie such a mundane use as a stable. The census of 1861
records a court bailiff as probably living at the cottage next to
the ‘stable’ and one might suppose that next door was
his repository. As a public building it would have justified the
ornate finishing touches.
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Extensions and alterations
You will see evidence of alterations and extensions in the brickwork
of a large number of buildings as the owners modified their property
for current needs, be it a growing family, the development of a
business or just for more space or convenience. 3
Church Street (part of Doncaster’s ‘town shop in
the country’) looks just such a case. Look over the school
wall to see evidence of much older brickwork at the lower levels
of the gable wall, suggesting that originally a single storey building
was attached to the larger building with Victorian brickwork taking
the building up to the additional upper floors. The photograph clearly
shows the brickwork of the ‘new’ Victorian façade
keyed in to the older courses in the side wall. At Kirkland
House the join between older and newer parts can be seen in
the brickwork and the roof. Note also the bricked
up doorway, and vestiges of a painted shop sign although there
is no remaining sign of the cross-corner doorway of the shop that
preceded the building’s use as a children’s home. To
the rear a bricked up stable door suggests new uses were found inside
the house for the space. There are several bricked up doorways in
other buildings, some of which are hidden from view by rendering
- 16 Long
Acre for instance photographed before the new rendering was
applied.
Extensions to form a second pile to the rear of a house are not
uncommon and the straight joints between old and new are usually
clearly visible. At 4
Long Acre this was to provide a framework knitters workshop,
and at the Wheatsheaf
either more drinking or more living space. The Wheatsheaf also had
extra storeys added and its original thatch replaced; the old
gable wall is still clearly marked in the older brickwork. Long
Acre Studios displays many patches of different brickwork, some
of which could have been full height doorways; some bricks are narrow
and almost certainly predate the building of the school here in
1840. At number 4
Station Street the extension took the form of an additional
house - the straight joint in the brickwork is clear evidence which
is carried through to the chimney. The new house was an investment
property for the original owner.
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Brickwork
Narrow bricks are often taken to indicate great age in a building.
Early 17th century bricks used in the general area around Bingham
were generally no more than 2-2½ins (50-57mm) in thickness
and local tendencies suggest that bricks that were 2? ins (60mm)
in thickness are uncommon in the 17th century. Bricks in Bingham
may show a tendency to be both thicker and longer than elsewhere,
possibly due to local production methods and the continued use of
similar moulds in brick kilns. Bingham has a number of buildings
with significant amounts of narrow brick (8¼”long,
2½”thick and 4” deep) that generally date from
the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. From the mid nineteenth
century bricks tended to be 3” thick. 20th century bricks
have reverted to about 2?” or 2?”. But there were many
variations and size alone is not an infallible guide.
Most of Bingham’s older houses are built in Flemish
bond brickwork, or at least they are where it shows at the front!
Here a stretcher and a header are placed alternately along each
course of brickwork. Around the back of the building the bonding
is often much less well formed and regular. Flemish Bond was introduced
to Britain in 1631, becoming widespread by the mid-seventeenth century.
Before that English
bond was common, and indeed in Yorkshire and Lancashire it was
extremely commonplace until the early 1900s. One of the few examples
in Bingham is the side wall of Cost Cutters along Union Street;
here one course of headers is followed by several (commonly three,
as here) courses of stretchers. Header bond is unusual and we believe
was most popular around 1700. Bingham’s only example is the
Manor House,
Market Place. Stretcher
bond was used for single course (half brick thickness) walls
and, of course once cavity walls came into use, sporadically from
the mid nineteenth century but universally by the early mid twentieth.
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Boot Scrapers
Boot scrapers were a highly practical ornamentation in the days
of few pavements and muddy roads. There are a great many in Bingham.
Some consist of a simple iron bar across a hole in brickwork, as
at 35 Long
Acre. Some are specially made stone inserts with the iron bar
fixed across; some of the best preserved examples of these are at
21 Church
Street and Kirkland
House, Kirkhill. Some houses had two scrapers - 1
Union Street on either side of the front door, and Lushai
Cottage, Fisher Lane, with a very basic one in the garden wall
and a smarter one in the wall near the house door!
Brompton house, Needham Street boasts only one scraper but apparently
in the wrong
place! It would surely have been too long a stretch to use this
without stepping back into the mud to get to the present doorway
well to its right. This is a clue to the original layout of the
house - the door has been moved away from the centre of the façade
(see Brompton House). The
most ornate of all are those scrapers that remain on most of the
houses of Porchester
Villas, Long Acre. There are similar ones on some quality houses
in Nottingham, so one assumes they must have been a stock item at
the ironmongers in the early 1890s. They rather emphasise our supposition
that these houses were built for the well off!
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Architectural Decoration
There are several examples in Bingham of very attractive chequer
board Flemish bonding, where light coloured bricks were selected
to use as headers to produce a satisfactory pattern for the façade.
13-16 Market
Place, the former manses in Kirkhill, number 4 Station Street
and other similar buildings in the surrounding villages suggest
a build date for this style of around 1840-1860. Possibly at least
100 years earlier is Pinchpenny
Cottage with a chequer board pattern picked out in narrow bricks
at each end of the facade. The latter also has a string course of
overhanging brickwork, known by some as Plat Bands. These were a
popular decorative feature and usually delineated the divide between
storeys. Pinchpenny
Cottage, the Wheatsheaf and Regency House each have one such
band; the 39 Long Acre has two bands indicating it has always had three
storeys. The post office also displays an unusual blind bulls-eye,
a popular decorative device of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries with no apparent function.
The Victorians copied a number of architectural styles from former
years. The Diaper
(diamond) pattern picked out in vitrified headers on Church House,
East Street, is typical of such practices. Another Victorian copy
is the herringbone
nogging work at 61/63 Long Acre.
A nineteenth century architect remodelled the houses in mock Tudor
fashion, but ironically they were originally sixteenth century anyway!
As well as chequer board, different coloured brickwork was used
to achieve decorative effect. Courses of blue bricks are evident
on many Victorian or Edwardian villas such as 9
and 11 Newgate Street, 12
and 14 Newgate Street, 7
to 15 Long Acre. Many of Bingham’s most recent developments
have revived this and other forms of decorative brickwork, for example
on the modern
estates. The houses forming James
Terrace have an appealing string course of moulded bricks mounted
on small corbels. An unusual arrangement of brickwork adorns the
tops of the facades of Porchester
Terrace. Gable ends offered opportunities for decoration many
architects could not resist - 28
Long Acre, Kirkhill
Manse and Porchester
Farm are three of many.
15 Church
Street has attractive alternate blue and red bricks to form
the window arches upstairs. Somewhat grander, perhaps, are the stuccoed
lintels found at 37 Long
Acre, at 1,
and 7
Union Street, the Chesterfield Arms and 1
Market Place (although close inspection suggests the latter
may be made of wood).
The Georgian era popularised the use of rubbed bricks to form a
bright smooth lintel with the thinnest of (often white) joints.
Examples are at 7
Church Street, 9 Fairfield Street and Brompton
House, where there are also two arches of fine rubbed brick.
Brompton House also displays how modern reproductions
often use the wrong kind of brick and cannot achieve the smooth
thin joints. The horizontal joints are actually lines scored into
the brick; they are not mortared joints. The reproduction gets these
wrong too!
Stone window
lintels came into use in the nineteenth century and display
a wide variety of subtly different decorative shapes. We hope one
day to trace some of these in pattern books, to see if they help
with dating some of the houses they adorn.
The Edwardian mock Tudor timbered panels of 8/10
Long Acre are Bingham’s only examples of this genre. The
Gables (89 Long Acre) is a year or two earlier (1910) than 8/10
Long Acre but lacks the half timbered treatment.
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Reminders of horse drawn days
The rounded
brickwork by the entrance to the driveway at the side of Tip
Top Laundry is a reminder of the days of horse and carts - the shape
reduced the chance of damage from the large protruding hubs of the
cartwheels. This principle might be at work at Regency House, Long
Acre, where the whole house wall is curved
on the Cherry Street corner - perhaps there was no pavement at the
time. There are a few driveways where the straight edged walls are
protected by stone fenders - 11-15
Church Street for example. The stone fender at 4
Long Acre has either been moved or would not have afforded much
protection being along the front of the house!
The ring
on the wall of number 32 Market Street was for hitching one’s
horse. There is a similar one outside the gateway at 9 Newgate Street.
The many barn doors were of course designed for carts with high
loads of hay. Several houses have driveways that were designed for
horse and cart access, and sometimes one can see the stable and
cart sheds beyond, e.g. 19
Church Street or 5
Long Acre.
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Doorways
Bingham has a few interesting doorways. Two very low ones hint at
the great age of the properties, as people were shorter a few hundred
years ago. One is at 21 Long Acre, the other in Market
Street. Another sign of age is that you step down into the house,
not up. There are a number of classical Georgian style doors, e.g.
7 Church
Street, 9
Fairfield Street and 30
Long Acre. The false
doors of the Horse and Plough are reminders that originally
the Primitive Methodist chapel was upstairs, while downstairs were
two cottages. The door to the cell
in the Old Court House was deliberately narrow to prevent the prisoner
escaping whilst the door was being opened. There are also some pretty
and elaborate porches in the town - a Victorian cast iron one at
Beauvale
House, 17 Market Place, a mock Georgian
portico built onto 18 Market Place after 1974, (the original
porch, c1900,
looks similar to that at Beauvale House
Manor Cottage (Market Place) and Banks
House.
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Water Pumps
Until the late 1930s Bingham residents relied on wells for their
supply of drinking water and underground soft water cisterns fed
from roof guttering for household use. A number of pumps, often
enclosed in wood to protect against frost can still be seen. Good
examples are at 5
Cherry Street, the rear of Brompton
House, Needham Street, Banks
Cottage and the decorative, lion’s head spout at Bradshaw’s
Cottages (34 Long Acre).
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Windows
The most interesting window in Bingham is probably the “doctors’”
at 7 Church Street. It was designed to admit air but not rain to
a sick room. The two bay windows with curved glass at 17 and 19
Church Street are also unique in Bingham. One historian’s
view is that true round bay windows such as these were for shops
and not houses. John Horsepool the butcher built the houses, so
maybe one was his shop too. The directories certainly put his business
in Church Street; there was a slaughter house at the rear and the
cellar is panelled with hooks in the ceiling possibly for storage
of carcasses. Church House displays the stone
mullioned windows one would expect in a Victorian reproduction!
19 The
Banks has similar Victorian Gothic tendencies! The pair of Victorian cottages at the corner of Fisher Lane and Long Acre ysed to have some lattice
design made of cast iron, but they were removed in 2010.
One or two Yorkshire sash windows (these slide sideways and can
date to the eighteenth century) can be seen in Bingham - notably
at 19 Market
Place and the Pine Shop on Fairfield Street. Double hung sash
windows abound, some with the horns that were introduced around
1850 a means of adding strength to the window frame, many without
and thus earlier - e.g. Chesterfield Arms and Brompton
House. Look for examples of newer windows with horns inserted
as replacements into a building where most windows are without -
7 Church
Street is one.
Bingham once boasted 60 odd Framework Knitters, many working in
their own workshops. The last long window needed to give added light
to the workroom was removed from a workshop
in Newgate Street in the 1960s. A restored workshop with a long
window is attached to the farmhouse at 7
Market Street. Another has been traced at the rear of 4
Long Acre, where the new brick infill is just discernible. The
thicker than normal beams
inside were to bear the weight of the machine upstairs.
Since Bingham was a town of 27 pubs, perhaps the last word on windows should be reserved for the now defunct Vaults Hotel (now 39 Long Acre) if you catch the light in the right aspect, the shadow of the name ‘Vaults’ used to be visible on the narrow window just above the post box. The glass was removed some years ago.
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Dentils, Coggins and all that
Look up at the line where the roof joins the wall and you will see
an almost endless variety of means by which the wall is assisted
to carry the roof timbers. The simplest is a straight joist of timber
along the length of the wall - a wall plate. This might be carried
on a slightly protruding course of bricks. Dogtooth (headers laid
at an angle giving a zigzag appearance) as at 11
Market Place and dentils (alternate protruding headers), for
example 1
Church Street, are found on both 18th and early 19th century
houses. Some building historians think the former were in use marginally
earlier, but documentary evidence is difficult to find. Moulded
bricks were used for the purpose in many ordinary Victorian Villas.
Examples are at 12/16
Market Place, Porchester
Farm, 28
Long Acre, 12-14
Newgate Street and 9
Newgate Street. As might be predicted, the Victorian architects
had fun with these features and they designed a wide variety of
corbelling for this purpose. 8
Newgate Street and 12-14
Newgate Street are just two examples. The most elaborate is
probably 3
Church Street, atop the extended and enhanced Doncaster’s
Manchester House building (presumably an indication of success).
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Roofs
In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century many buildings would
have been thatched. The signs of a previously thatched roof are
usually a steep pitch to the present roof and brick parapets at
each end of the roof. The steep pitch encouraged rain to run off
quickly before soaking into the roofing material. Parapets were
a precaution against the spread of fire introduced after the great
fire of London. 39 Long Acre has parapets and the pitch of the roof was much steeper once. The evidence for a lowering of the pitch can be seen in the change of brickwork in the gable
ends. Seymour
Cottage, Church Street, popularly believed to be the original
post office, has a steep ‘thatch’ pitch and a traditional
cat slide roof to the extension, which would also have been thatched.
Not being close to other buildings it would presumably not have
needed parapets. The old photograph of 57
Long Acre shows it with its thatch.
Church
House has a particularly elaborate roof design in keeping with
the rest of this Victorian extravaganza! Kirkland House is more
restrained in its use of a gentle pattern
in the slates. The almost ubiquitous pantile is used throughout
much of Bingham, with some plain tiles by way of relief, e.g. 19
Market Place.
Run off rainwater is generally taken away by gutters and down pipes
- in older houses usually to an underground soft water cistern.
However two buildings in Bingham have a lead gully behind a wooden
plank fitting flush with the wall. These are 7
Church Street and Brompton
House, which also has one of the few dated drainpipe
hoppers in the town.
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Chimneys
Chimneys developed to take away smoke from the hearth that previously
escaped through vents or holes in the roof. Brick offered a fireproof
but in the early days expensive form of construction, and the design
of many early chimneys tended to become a statement of status as
much as function. This has continued even to today!
Older detached houses in Bingham tend to have a chimney at one or
both ends. In the case of semi-detached or terraces, of course,
it would be cheaper for adjoining properties to share a chimney.
There are, however, a number of detached houses with a central chimney,
a feature which tends to indicate a build date well before the end
of the 1700s, after which the fashion changed. The 39 Long Acre, the Manor
House and Beauvale
House are three examples. 23
Market Place and the rear cottage of 19
Church Street are less obvious examples. Where a detached house
appears to have a central chimney, it is often because an extension
has been built beyond the original gable
end.
Some extravagantly decorated chimneys are worth looking out for
- the mock Tudor ones at 61-63
Long Acre and those at Church
House recall the Elizabethan era. 29
Long Acre, the Old
Court House and 19
Church Street seem to be as much statement as function with
its three flues, one for each fire place! The builders of more humble
houses for the Chesterfield’s Estate must have felt the same
way if those at 1-5
Cherry Street are anything to go by!
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