Lost cottages

WE PROTECT our large and important buildings for posterity yet the smaller ones, the cottages where the people lived, brought up families and died, have been demolished indiscriminately despite the part they played in our social history.

In recent years, many mediaeval cottages around Bourne have been bulldozed out of existence to make way for new housing and our heritage has been diminished accordingly. The most famous among them was the 18th century Cuckoo Bush Cottage, a quaint and attractive thatched property which stood isolated in North Road and became the subject of an Edwardian picture postcard called A Bit of Old Bourne. Copies were posted all over the world but the cottage was demolished in 1965 to make way for an access road to Digby Court, the residential home for retired people in what is now Christopher's Lane, although the name is still used by many older residents who insist on referring to it as Cuckoo Bush Lane.

Another example was No 35 on the west side of South Street which was also known as Gray's Farm because the late Mrs Alice Gray and her husband David were farmers who had taken over the business from his father, Mr Snowdon Gray, when he died, and the land adjoining the house was always filled with produce in season, cabbages, potatoes, carrots, parsnips, cauliflowers and Brussels sprouts while there were some animals such as chickens and pigs in the outhouses at the back.

The fen type cottage was built in the early 18th century, perhaps even before, and consisted of a single storey with a steep pantile roof, two gabled dormers and casements. It was constructed in red brick but had been rough cast and colour washed. The front windows were added in the 19th century with flat arches and wooden frames and no glazing bars while the door was of plain wood. There was a modern one-storey addition at the side, a brick extension at the rear with a mansard roof and two dormers and the ground floor was latterly used as a garage.

Mrs Gray, who died earlier this year aged 89, was marooned inside during severe flooding in the spring of 1968 but happily chatted to firemen from an upstairs window as they pumped away outside to clear the road. The location of the cottage was unfortunate because it stood on a sharp bend and created a road hazard when increasing traffic flows were beginning to cause problems in urban areas and although earmarked as a building worthy of preservation, it was demolished in January 1977 and the site used for two new houses, Numbers 35 and 37, whose frontages have been set back from the road.

A few weeks later, a letter from Roderick Hoyle, of Pinewood Close, Bourne, appeared in the Stamford Mercury lamenting the loss of the cottage and asking why it could not have been preserved, creating as it did a picture of placid rural charm in the shadow of Bourne Abbey because he wrote:

With forethought, the A15 could have been diverted through what is now the library and fire station when Bourne station closed to passengers in 1958 but since the end of January, the Grays' farmhouse is no more. How many Brunnnians can remember Mr David Gray driving his cattle from the byre behind the house and through the town to Stamford Hill? Controversy over its preservation in the 1960s at such a vulnerable traffic point sealed the fate of this 250-year-old mud and stud pantiled farm. The floods of the late 1960s decided matters for Mr and Mrs Gray when meals arrived by boat via the dormer windows and after nearly 70 years as home, they regretfully decided that it was no longer a sociable spot. Mrs Gray remembers passing traffic being visible from any window; butter making in the lean-to dairy; and the yard as bike-shed for cinema goers; North Sea rigs shaving the guttering and train loads of Midland holidaymakers bound for Norfolk.

Roy Hoyle, art master at Bourne Grammar School, was one of the great conservation campaigners for Bourne and ironically it was yet another lost cottage which became the catalyst for the formation of the Civic Society. It began at a public meeting at the Red Hall in 1977, inspired by Mr Hoyle, when a steering committee was set up and the following year, a second such meeting approved a constitution to protect our heritage and promote high standards of town planning. The impetus for the society's formation was to save No 15 Bedehouse Bank from demolition, a mediaeval thatched cottage made from the mud and stud method and one of the last surviving examples of its kind in Lincolnshire, and so the property was unique to Bourne where it had been in continuous use for more than 250 years.

The dwelling was known as Miss Adams' cottage, after the last tenant who had died, when it was condemned by the local authority as being unfit for human habitation and had been put up for sale as a redevelopment site but the owners failed to find a buyer. Experts insisted that it was sufficiently rare to be preserved, perhaps as a museum, but costs were said to be prohibitive and the owners sought permission to pull it down. Although it was a listed building, the cottage was demolished in 1980 after a public inquiry when objections by the Civic Society, the Ancient Monuments Society and other conservation organisations, were overruled.

Despite the failure of this campaign, the joint endeavour sparked an appreciation of the richness of the urban environment and the society vowed to help enhance our old buildings, through persuasion and criticism, to plant and landscape unattractive areas and so preserve the heritage of the town. The Earl of Ancaster was invited to be their president and he continued in office until his death in March 1983 when he was succeeded by his daughter, Baroness Willoughby de Eresby, who remains in office today. The inaugural meeting also voted to produce a regular newsletter and to bring guest speakers to the town to talk on environmental issues and both of these objectives have been achieved in the years since.