The imposing frontage was built of the distinctive yellow bricks being manufactured at Little Bytham at that time and have weathered well although the shop display windows on the ground floor have been altered several times over the years to suit successive owners.

The property has had a chequered history and during the 19th century it was used by A Pick and Company, a wholesale and retail ironmongers and implement agents, with an adjoining blacksmith's forge underneath the arch. Arnold Pick was one of Bourne’s most successful businessmen, arriving here as a youth with less than £5 in his pocket but his reputation as an agricultural engineer eventually extended throughout Lincolnshire. He was operating from this building in 1885 but when he died, the business was taken over in April 1891 by Mr Ernest Foley who moved to the town with his brother George from Driffield in Yorkshire.

He expanded trade to cater for the increasing popularity of the motor car and when he died in 1926, the premises were acquired by T A Stocks, motor agent, a firm established six years before with branches at Lincoln and Boston, who called their garage the Motor House. At this time, the main road between Peterborough and Lincoln (now the A15) ran past the front and as motorised traffic was on the increase, petrol was supplied from a pump outside the building with an arm that was swung out over the road to supply fuel to passing motorists.

In 1937, the building was purchased by Edward Pearce, the jeweller and watchmaker, who ran the shop next door at No 32, and opened as a motor showroom and workshops run by his son, William Ronald Pearce, who had already begun a garage and petrol business in Meadowgate, known as the Jubilee Garage. A filling station was also opened in Abbey Road.

The Jubilee Garage was founded in 1935 and was so named because it opened soon after King George V and Queen Mary had celebrated their Silver Jubilee.

William Pearce, always known as Ron, had served an apprenticeship as a motor engineer with the Vauxhall company at Luton. He had already set up in business there with a partner who disappeared with the takings and so he returned to Bourne to begin again, working first as an agricultural contractor.

He married Doll Baldock, daughter of Frederick and Annie Baldock who ran Baldock’s Mill in South Street, and they moved into one of the new semi-detached houses built in the back garden of No 32 North Street where his father’s business was situated but with a frontage in Meadowgate. It was here in the yard of the house at No 64 Meadowgate that he and Saville Turner founded their motor and electrical engineering business with a single hand-operated pump in the front garden offering BP petrol at 1s.1d. a gallon.

Ron also opened a radio business at No 32 North Street for his father but soon the garage project was flourishing and they decided to build new premises in Abbey Road, at the corner of the vicarage gardens next to the Abbey Lawn, as part of Edward Pearce and Company Ltd, and it opened in 1937 as agents for Standard Cars, a company selling one of the popular models of the day.

After the Second World War of 1939-45, they ended their association with Edward Pearce and formed Jubilee Garage (Bourne) Ltd, amalgamating with another motor engineering business run by George Shelton and Charles Hall, that was based in the yard behind the shop premises at No 42 North Street owned by fishmonger Walter Elkins.

The new company acquired the premises at No 30 North Street which became the main showroom and workshops while the Abbey Road building became a service station. As the business expanded, it was granted a dealership for the Rootes Group, selling Humber, Hillman, Sunbeam Talbot and later Singer cars, and regional distribution rights for Reliant cars and vans. In those days, garages repaired rather than replaced and so the main premises were fully equipped as an engineering workshop, re-boring and reconditioning engines and distributing parts and tyres over a wide area.

After the death of Edward Pearce in 1946, the premises at No 30 North Street were sold and the proceeds helped fund extensions to the Jubilee Garage in Abbey Road, built on to the side of the existing building, so taking up the remaining frontage of the vicarage gardens.

Ron’s son, Robert, who had joined the garage in 1952 after working for the Rootes Group in Coventry, stayed until 1969 when he left to start a new career in business and four years later formed his own consultancy company. Steve Ayliff, who had joined Edward Pearce and Company as an errand boy, eventually rose to be managing director of the Jubilee Garage (Bourne) Ltd, until it finally closed in 1978. The premises were sold and after a short spell as a showroom for specialised used cars the building was taken over by the present owners, Fenland Shops Limited.

Ron and his wife retired to Colsterworth and when he died in 1974, aged 73, Mrs Pearce moved to Chester to be near their son, Bob Pearce and his wife Pat who live there in retirement.

The façade of the quaint property next door has also been retained in the development reminding us that it was once Pick’s Forge but taken over by Foley brothers. Ironically both Arnold Pick and Ernest Foley died prematurely, Pick in 1891 at the age of 46 when he suffered a fatal stroke while locking up for the night, and Foley in 1926, aged 56, after a massive heart attack soon after returning home from a business visit to Harrogate Show. Both are buried in the town cemetery but along with the Jubilee Garage, their names have now been preserved as part of the street scene.

NOTE: This article appeared in The Local newspaper on Friday 25th August 2006.