This building has been featured in this walk to represent all the other, numerous buildings in this town that hide their true age behind the accretions of a number of ages. Look at it and you would assume it is of an age with the adjacent George Hall – 1912 – no such thing!
Looking down Old Market Place and across from Union Street shows these houses were once quite separate.
Instead, these late C19 images reveal quite a different arrangement with a gate and another Victorian side building where the drive to George Hall now leads.
So, what was going on there? Luckily the Tithe Map, surveyed and compiled in 1838, helps solve the mystery. What are now numbers 20-24 Old Market Place were all owned by a Thomas Arnold, a grocer -he lived in the larger section – here numbered 749, where the bit that stuck forwards was, by 1841, being lived in by 4 ladies in their 70s and a servant girl!
They replaced a Tanner and Brewer’s family, the Hugman’s whose business was in trouble meaning they had to downsize. They had brewed in the adjacent Yard – now Shipp’s Yard.
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