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David Hope has produced an illustrated leaflet describing a self-guided walk around the old buildings of Mere.  It can be downloaded by clicking here Paper copies are available in the Mere Tourist Information Centre.

Michael Tighe has produced a guide to the historical buildings of Mere - see below. A printed version of this paper is available for little cost in the Mere Information Centre in the library. Proceeds of the sales go to the Friends of St Michaels Church

THE DOMESTIC BUILDINGS OF MERE

AN INTRODUCTION

This paper examines the overall history of the everyday buildings of the town, their construction, appearance and final fate.   It is planned that more detailed descriptions of groups of individual properties  and their owners and occupiers will appear in future papers.

It is the general pattern of guide books and local histories to devote much space and time to those buildings which are impressive in appearance or of architectural significance, whilst virtually ignoring the large number of "vernacular" buildings in which the majority of the inhabitants lived and worked and which in the mass give a town its character.   Our previous histories of Mere have suffered from this defect, and it is hoped that this paper, and future ones where individual properties will be described in more detail, will redress the balance.

The immediate impression that the newcomer to Mere receives is that of a silvery-grey town, roofed in tile or slate, with very plain window and door openings lacking the mullioned embellishments to be found in towns and villages further West.  One or two larger houses break the mould, but the general picture is of attractive simplicity, with individuality appearing in fenestration and in varying roof lines.  There is an impression of timelessness, which, for reasons to be discussed, is rather deceptive.  There is a complete absence of front gardens, with all the houses built before the late XIXc fronting directly on to the street.   Indeed, what is seen is a perfect example of the vernacular building style of Southern England, little affected by the influence of architectural stylists, but reflecting the use of local materials by generations of local building craftsmen following their old traditions without aiming at any pretentiousness.

One great difficulty for the historian is to ascribe a definite date for any particular property in the town.   The local stone, for all its attractive appearance, is severely subject to weathering, and all the houses have probably been rebuilt, or at least  heavily remodelled at least once during their lives, though re-using the original materials and adhering to their traditional styles.   Sometimes the evidence for such rebuilding is apparent, but more often it is only revealed by documentary study.

Naturally, the buildings of the town reflect its general social history and structure.  Mere has always been a small town, with its inhabitants engaged in fairly small scale farming and textile production on a domestic basis, or serving the daily needs of such a community.   The largest landholding, the Manor of Mere,  was from Norman days in the hands of the Duchy of Cornwall - the mediaeval equivalent of the modern corporate institutional landlord - so that there was no resident "Squire" to influence society.  For a relatively brief period when the Castle was actively occupied it would have been a major feature of the local economy, and many of the mediaeval houses will have depended on it for their existence and lived in its shadow; on its abandonment at the end of the XIVc the Duchy's interest in Mere will have only been as a source of income, and the stones of the Castle provided a handy quarry  of ready worked stone to be incorporated in the buildings of the town.

The other Manors, Zeals, Chadenwycke and Woodlands, all had their houses away from the town centre, and while they all survive as substantial buildings of considerable historical and architectural interest in their own right, and have been written up in detail by previous historians, their influence on the vernacular architecture of the town proper has only been marginal.

Of the original domestic buildings of the town, no trace remains.  It is a frequently overlooked fact that prior to the mid XVIc stone and brick building in England was confined to the major institutions of the Church, the Crown and a few very rich land owners, and even then it was only the wealthier who were able to indulge their fancies.  Ordinary houses and buildings were invariably constructed with far simpler and less permanent materials - timber and the local clays, in "cob" form, roofed with thatch of corn, reed or heather.  The skills and labour were not available for the more sophisticated masonry.   The Blackmore Vale was originally well wooded and there would have been ample supplies of timber available locally for building the quite simple cottages and farm buildings that were the standard dwellings of all but the rich - generally little more than hovels with earth floors, little changed over a millenium from those occupied by the early Saxon settlers.   Further to the South West in Dorset cottages built in cob and thatch survived well into this century in areas lacking local supplies of building stone, as did a small number of more sophisticated timber framed buildings.

Such simple building will have been the norm in the early centuries of this millenium, through the economic collapse which coincided with, though not necessarily entirely caused by, the Black Death, and will have continued for some centuries later until growing prosperity led, around the end of the XVIc to a revolution in building standards throughout the country.  In districts lacking good supplies of local stone, or of clay of brick making quality, this led to the glorious timber framed  buildings we associate with the Weald and the Welsh Marches, but in our part of the country stone was to become the favoured material, and Mere as we know it began to take shape.  The process was a gradual one; as the mean buildings fell into decay - their life was usually numbered in decades rather than in centuries anyway - they will have been replaced by more permanent structures in stone.

If the new materials gave a new look to the town, its overall shape was probably little changed, and the boundaries between plots would have been unchanged.  By this time the pattern of development had been established - lines of houses fronting the main street of the town - Castle & Salisbury Streets - with the group around the Church and Church Street making together a nucleated settlement.  These were all distinguished by narrow frontages to the street, and long narrow plots running back to the back lanes, and many had connected with them small holdings of land elsewhere in the parish, and rights in the common lands of the Manor.   In addition there were a considerable number of isolated cottages scattered around the parish, near the outlying farms, along the Shaftesbury Road, and in little settlements such as Rook Street.

There were two local sources of stone for this rebuilding.  Dead Maid Quarry, now the industrial estate at the end of Castle Street, in the Upper Greensand and the Warminster Sands,  was the major source, and continued to be worked for road metal till 1931.  At Wolverton there were ancient quarries where a greenish sandstone was mined from the Upper Greensand, and the resulting caves can still be traced; it seems likely that these workings were abandoned in mediaeval times, having been used for parts of the Church and possibly the Castle, and were not actually exploited for later domestic building.  A striking feature, however, of many of the older houses in the town is the random presence, particularly as quoins, of very large squared blocks of this greener stone;  these probably reflect the use of the old stones of the Castle as a quarry.  It is noticeable that these stones rarely appear in properties to the East of the town centre

The Mere stone, despite its attractive colouring, cannot be regarded as an ideal building stone.  It is soft, and weathers badly as is evidenced by the accumulation of fine debris often to be seen at the base of walls. As a result, buildings were frequently repaired and reconstructed.    It is not a freestone suitable for working up into features; at its best it was fashioned into rather small rectangular blocks which could be coursed, but occasionally the appearance is more that of a rubble construction. Interestingly, a building lease of properties in North Street in 1865_[2]  specifies the use of either "the hard Mere stone in walls 18" thick, or brick only 14" thick, and tile roofing"; in the event stone was used.  The absence of a convenient supply of freestone means that quoins were particularly vulnerable, and, more important for the overall visual effect, window and door openings are unadorned 'holes in the wall'.  With the building line being hard against the pavement, porches are unknown; here and there a modest canopy protects the door.

Whilst the main structures were now in stone, the basic roofing material remained thatch well into the XIXc; one thatched roof in the Square survived till 1910, and a few examples still survive away from the centre of the town.  In some cases, where thatch has been replaced, it noticeable that the roof is still of a higher pitch than its neighbours, suggesting that either the original roof timbers were retained or that the line of the previous roof was kept.  In at least one instance, "The Grange" in Water Street, the typical early timbers of a late XVc building survive in the roof, suggesting that the main structure is probably little altered;  older roof-timbers survive in other properties.

On the very grandest houses, stone slate was used for roofing.  Not only was the transport of these special stones from a distance an expensive matter, but the great weight meant that far stronger timbers were necessary than were required for thatch. One example remains - the Ship Inn still has a fine stone roof.   Dewes House also was stone-roofed, but unfortunately this was stripped in the 1950's and the stones were replaced with tiles.   Early prints of Woodlands Manor also hint at it having a stone roof, though parts were certainly thatched until the time of the 1880's restoration.

Some light is shed upon the accommodation provided by the earlier houses in the inventories attached to the XVI & XVIIc probate inventories, a number of which detail the deceased's belongings according to the rooms in which they were found.  Unfortunately it is usually impossible to relate these to specific sites to-day - our ancestors did not use post codes, and only in exceptional cases were houses named; in more relaxed times everybody knew where every one else lived!  What is apparent is the small scale of the great majority of the houses; basically they had a hall [the main living and cooking area, once open to the roof] and one chamber, or bedroom, kitchen, buttery for storage, and the odd outbuilding.  Typically George Pinchin, a feltmaker, who died in 1636, had hall, chamber and loft; Thomas Coke, a fuller, in 1578 had hall chamber and workhouse, while Randall Coward in 1601, a farmer, had hall, chamber [containing five beds!] and kitchen.  This 2-room pattern is constantly repeated.

Even substantial tradesmen had little more. Randall Bannister, a linen weaver operating five looms and farming 10 acres of arable land, with a reasonable herd of cattle, who died in 1583, had hall chamber, second chamber over the hall, kitchen and "shop" for his weaving.  Another weaver on a similar scale, George Rogers alias Ball in 1645 had hall, "Citching & Buttery", best chamber, "next chamber"and shop; his kinsman Hugh in 1668 had the same.  In 1683 Michael Down, the edge tool maker had hall, kitchen, buttery and shop with chambers over the hall, over the buttery and "at the stair head".  John Hebditch, yeoman, in 1685 had hall, parlour, buttery, kitchen, and two chambers - whilst the emergence of a parlour may indicate a step up  socially, the accommodation remains fairly basic.

There were, of course, a few grander establishments.   By 1642 John Baron, decidedly gentry, had hall, parlour, study, kitchen, larder, washing house, little kitchen, brewhouse, best chamber, "Arthur's chamber", "Mr. Greene's chamber", chambers over each kitchen, and lofts.  Such houses were a rarity.

One of the great hazards in historical times was fire; thatched roofs and open fires, probably with defective chimneys, frequently led to disaster, sometimes for an individual property but often on a larger scale. A Survey of the Manor records that  in 1529 virtually the whole of the town was burnt, and a licence was given to cut down timber in Knowle Wood for rebuilding. Four years after the Great Fire of London, in 1670, 54 houses were destroyed in another catastrophe, and collections were made on a nationwide "brief" to assist the inhabitants.   It is quite likely that much of the rebuilding in stone may date from such disasters, and it seems more than coincidence that Dewes House is generally dated to the mid XVIIc.   

Stone and thatch remained the standard building materials until the late XIXc and a number of early photographs show the persistence of thatch well into this century. At the time of the 1851 census, the town's builders employed 20 masons and 6 thatchers - but no bricklayers.   At Knowl, near Barrow Street, there were 5 tile makers, so presumably roofing tiles were made there - slate would not have made its appearance so far inland in pre-railway days.  

T.H.Baker_[1] states that by tradition Mere Down Farm House was rebuilt c1720 for the farmer of the Duchy, using bricks made at "Knoll" in Barrow Street; if this is correct, this seems to be the sole example of the use of brick in the district until the end of the next century, which is all very strange, especially as Baker comments on the difficulties of haulage at that time.   

During the XVII & XVIIIc Mere enjoyed a period of comparative prosperity, to which we owe buildings such as Deans Orchard, Dewes House and the Ship, and also "Hindley's House" [now the bakery & delicatessen] and its neighbour, the house of Hindley's patron Harding [since demolished] _[3]  A feature related to that time is the number of low arched "wagon" entrances to houses such as some in Church Street, to permit access by loaded trade wagons to the yards and stores at the rear. Otherwise the general form of the towns buildings remained little altered.

It was in the latter part of the XIXc that changes began to appear.  Local businessmen such as Charles Jupe and Charles Coward built a number of cottage developments either on old sites or on "green field" sites such as those in North Road.  These were still stone and tile buildings, but affording more generous accommodation and of a style reflecting the age, rather than the traditional - higher pitched roofs, decorative trimmings and new materials available through improved transport.

Right at the end of the XIXc a new material arrived on the Mere scene - one which had been used by the Romans and introduced elsewhere in the country in Tudor times. In nearby Gillingham bricks and tiles had been made in a small way for many years, though, as in Mere house building had remained in stone till the mid-century.  However, the coming of the railway had led to the establishment there of a large brickworks producing a very hard red brick which was sent far afield, as well as turning Gillingham into a brick-built town.  This brick became beloved of builders on account of its ready availability and its hardness and durability.

Mere was slow to accept this new material for new buildings, but it was eventually adopted to overcome the failure of the local stone to provide good quoins.  From about 1880 onwards when a house was repaired or altered, the opportunity was taken to replace the quoins, window openings &c with Gillingham brick - to-day we can still see the unpleasing result of this throughout the town. Unhappy though the result may be, one can understand the local builders, working to very tight budgets, jumping at the possibility of overcoming the physical defect of the local stone; aesthetics would have taken a very low priority in their calculations.  In many cases modern builders and developers, no doubt hoping to placate the planners by adopting what they see as a local vernacular style, have followed this pattern, with equally unhappy effect,  when building in modern pre-cast imitation stone blocks on the outskirts of the town.   Even less successful aesthetically were the, fortunately few, new buildings put up around the turn of the century entirely in brick, such as the chemists shop in the Square - replacing a very old thatched shop - and one in Pettridge Lane, which are totally out of keeping with the traditional town.   At the same time, the Duchy built new blocks near Wellhead and on the Causeway in the same brick but even more obtrusive as they are in a design which mirrors that of the XIXc War Office barrack buildings.

Various social influences were to affect the appearance of the town around the end of the XIXc.  Despite the decline of  English farming, and the depression in the textile industries, Mere's two staples,  a considerable number of properties were either completely rebuilt or thoroughly renovated.   In addition, many small cottages, particularly outside the town centre, were allowed to fall into decay and disappeared completely.  A press report of 1907_[4]  depicts these sites in some detail.  There is some political agenda in the report, but it seems apparent that the Duchy had as a matter of policy been allowing cottage property to decay; this coincided with a period when the Duchy was putting a succession of domestic properties up for sale, obviously concentrating its investment on its farms, most of which were the subject of radical improvement during the period.   Whilst most of these abandoned properties were small cottages, some, such as "Symmingtons" near Hinks Mill, would seem to have been quite substantial.  In 1821 Symmingtons appears on the Enclosure Award Map, but by 1848 it was merely a field, part of Swainsford Farm; in 1998, Mr.R.J. Finan, fieldwalking newly ploughed land there, identified the site of a substantial building with pottery remains pointing to at least XVc occupation.   This would suggest that the policy of letting properties go was not a new one at the end of the century - this abandonment would have been during the time when the entire management of the Duchy Estate was "farmed" to the Shultz family [in modern terms, privatised!].

One area deserves special mention.  Whilst generally speaking the town developed in an orderly fashion, with street [and often rear] frontages, land on either side of the upper reaches of the Shreen Water - Upper Water Street and The Field - presents a totally different picture.  Houses are jostled together higgledy-piggledy on tiny plots, abutting each other at different angles, and approached by the narrowest of winding footpaths.  It is an area whose strange development warrants more detailed study to ascertain the origins of such haphazard growth.  One theory which has been advanced is that these houses could be the result of early "squatting" on the Manorial Waste, but it has to be stressed that at present this in no more than a theory.

Over the centuries, of course, the use and occupation of many buildings has been subject to change.    Original large or medium sized houses - and indeed many which we would regard as already small - were split up into multiple occupation.   The 1851 census for Church Street, for example, shows far more separate households than there are individual cottages on the Tithe Map compiled only three years before.   It is pretty certain that at the same time as properties were being allowed to fall into decay, many of the surviving ones were, by our modern standards, desparately overcrowded.  At the same time, other properties fronting the main streets were becoming shops, though nearly always still providing homes for their proprietors.

Added to the problems of over crowding was the rudimentary nature of the services available.  Since 1866 there had been pressure for the provision of proper drainage, but it was 1879 before finally there was any main sewer in the town.  Until then the inhabitants had had to rely on earth or bucket closets, with the attendant disposal problems, and on cesspits often dangerously close to the many wells which supplied the drinking water.   Even when the sewers had been installed, water-borne sanitation remained dependent on water pumped or winched from the wells until mains water came in 1909.   It was fortunate for the people of Mere that the town's situation on the spring line led to the ready availability of these wells, which appear very liberally distributed on the early large scale maps, but even with them, achievement of the cleanliness exhorted by the Victorian moralists must have been hard to achieve.  It is interesting to find in the deeds of some of these cottage properties care being taken to define the rights of one property to use of the pump in its neighbour's garden!

The XIXc also saw the rebuilding of some of the Market Place properties on a grander scale, such as the replacement of the White Hart and Swan inns and the replacement of the vicarage in Church St, itself rebuilt after a fire in 1774, by what is now Bramley House.

As everywhere, it is the present century that has made the greatest mark upon the town.  Prior to WWI Mere changed but little, but from then on the revolution in life styles and the growth of mobility were the cause of great changes. 

Reference has already been made to the number of cottages which had been allowed to fall into decay in the late XIXc.  This process was against the background of a declining population, and there had been sufficient private development for rent to cater for those remaining.  However in 1926 the local authority, Mere RDC, later to become Mere & Tisbury RDC built the first Council houses, in White Road, to be followed by those in Clements Lane and Barnes Place; 54 such houses had been completed by 1939, when the outbreak of war brought all domestic building to a halt.  In 1946 6 houses were built at Old Hollow, to be followed by the estate of 42 houses between Manor and North Roads, 8 "prefabricated" houses in Angel Lane and 26 at Bramley Hill, and the sheltered housing there and at Lynch Close.  When the RDC finally merged into Salisbury District Council, 240 council houses were transferred - a substantial proportion of the residential accommodation of the town.  Subsequently, of course, many of these have been acquired by their tenants.

This provision of public sector housing coincided with another social change which was to have great significance for towns such as Mere.  PreWWII the great majority of the inhabitants of the town were local people who could trace their ancestry back in the town for centuries, and there were relatively few incomers. However, growing national prosperity and mobility and an awareness of the attractions of a semi-rural existence created the phenomenon of retirement to West Country towns such as Mere, and to-day a substantial proportion of the population are mature incomers.  Many of the cottages vacated by those moving into the council houses have been bought by them and, of course, adapted to modern living.  Some, but fortunately relatively few, have become "holiday homes", standing empty for much of the time, but most of them are occupied by permanent residents who have integrated into the community.

Private development prior to the mid 1960's had been limited to a very few individual houses on scattered sites such as Pettridge Lane, but about that time some 80 "estate" type houses were built at Springfield, Lordsmead and Southbrook, and a considerable number of individual houses and bungalows have been built on "infill" sites.  Both these processes continue to this day, with the Housing Association developments on the allotment site at White Road continuing, the Kingsmere development at the foot of Long Hill and pressure to build on any remaining small plots.  When one stands on Castle Hill and looks out to the vast growth of Gillingham and Motcombe one can only wonder what the future may hold for Mere.

The growth of traffic through the town has also had its effect.   The decision in the early post war years to make the A303 the primary route to the West of England, rather than the traditional A30 route, had a serious impact on the town, which became notorious as a bottleneck, with the irritation to motorists only equalled by the impact of heavy traffic on those living there.   At first the problem was only tackled piecemeal, as a result of which two prominent features were demolished in the name of road safety - the old "Triangle" building and the entire Northern frontage of the "Talbot" site.  The final solution came in the 1980's with the building of the by-pass, which, with one exception, was entirely on agricultural land.   The only demolition involved was at the Eastern end, where the flyover is on the site of what was once the "Castle" inn and of "Castle House", a large house built in 1860 for Isaiah Maggs Jupe, and in its latter days used as a children's home by the local authority.

The houses of Mere, as has already been explained, have been subject to constant change and rebuilding over the centuries.  They were in the main built by local craftsmen to fulfil local needs, and demonstrate dynamic development.   When building, our ancestors were governed entirely by the requirements of the time, and would have had no thought of the aesthetic feelings of future generations.  As recently as the late XIXc little consideration was given to the preservation of the old, apart from certain prestige buildings.   In the 1880's there were even proposals, fortunately thwarted by the lobbying of the Wiltshire architect C.E.Ponting, to effect disastrous alterations to Woodlands Manor - vernacular buildings were completely ignored until the latter part of this century.    Indeed, from the earliest times houses were not commonly built with a view to their having lives of centuries;  it is no mere coincidence that in most parts of the country it was the common practice for housing developments to be carried out on the basis of a 99 year lease, roughly covering the life expectancy of the first owner and his children or grandchildren at the most; on expiry the site would revert to the head landlord, giving him the chance to redevelop a building which might have reached the end of its useful life.   Nowadays all development is by freeholders, but one has to wonder what the fate of most of the houses built in recent years will be by the end of the XXIc.  Will our modern techniques and materials endure, or will the sucessors to British Heritage and our other conservation bodies be lobbying for the preservation and restoration of the four bedroom executive style of 1990?

It has been the intention of this paper to give a general overview of the domestic buildings of the town; no attempt has been made to include the public buildings.  It is hoped to follow it with a series of further articles examining different sectors of the town in greater detail, with an examination of the present buildings and some attempt to establish the history of individual sites.

No claim is made of architectural expertise in the treatment of this historical study. However, the writer, a layman, thanks Mr. Sean Lander, of Lordsmead House, the home of his ancestors, for his valuable comments on the draft.   The views - and remaining errors - are though those of the writer alone.

SOURCES

[1] - T.H.Baker, "Notes", WANHS 1898 p258

[2[ - WRO 2776

[3] - see "Mere Papers"  3 pp 32/33

[4] - see Mere WI Scrapbook