THE WHOLE SITE IS UNDER MAJOR CONSTRUCTION

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A printed version of this paper written by Michael Tighe 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 SQUARE AND THE MARKET PLACE

From mediaeval times  Markets were formalised institutions, and their establishment was a privilege granted either by the Crown or by the Lord of the Manor.  At a time when there was no legal system to police trade the creation of a Market was amongst other things an early exercise in consumer protection, and gradually statute law evolved covering commercial behaviour, supplemented by such regulations as the  Market authorities established.    The Charters establishing markets would make provisions governing their operation and frequently granting those involved in them reciprocal freedom from market tolls elsewhere in the country.

 In 1399 the men and tenants of the Manor of Mere, “part of the ancient demesne of the Crown” were confirmed in the privilege of exemption from such toll throughout England “as they ought and had hitherto been accustomed to be” - a wording which may reflect the lawlessness of past years and leaves us in doubt as to whether there may have been earlier provisions for a market.   In 1408 King Henry IV granted his son Henry Prince of Wales and Duke of Cornwall the right to have two fairs annually at Mere - one at the day of St John ante Portam Latinum [6th May, old style] and the other  at St Bartholomew’s day [August  24th].  Both fairs lasted for a whole week.   It is not known when the holding of these fairs lapsed but it was certainly a very long time ago.   

 More importantly, Henry IV’s charter provided for a weekly market, originally to be held on Wednesdays but later moved to Tuesdays.   This established  Mere as a Market town, though there could well have been one earlier, as a “presentation” was made in 1423 that a certain cross in the town had become defective and ruinous through the default of the Vicar.  This might have been a market cross, providing a preaching point and a point where tolls could be collected.^[i]   It was common for these market crosses to develop from a mere stone cross on a pedestal to a covered structure, often of considerable architectural merit, which would provide shelter both for a preacher but also for more commercial users, and in many places grew into a two-storey building with market facilities at ground level and a rudimentary community hall above.   This indeed happened in Mere, though we are unable to put a date to the structure.

The Clock Tower which now dominates the Market Place stands on the site of such a market-hall.  The first documentary evidence so far traced is from a time when it must have been long established  and is interesting in showing that although the building must have belonged to the Duchy as part of the Manor of Mere its operation had been farmed out to the private sector.  In 1578 William Doddington, son of the then owner of Woodlands Manor, died and his father took the responsibility of winding up his affairs.   The father seems not to have taken his duties seriously, as in December 1596 his widow finally settled  the estate and filed her accounts.    These refer to “one lease or assignment of a certain howse or chappell in Meere called the Cross House with a chamber a shop and certain shambles to the said annexed for forteen years to come”.   Elsewhere is a reference to the lease having had 32 years to run at the time of William’s death, so the family would seem to have kept the operation going.

The quoted description points to the market house having a Chapel as part of its facilities - a not uncommon feature in pre-Reformation days.  Moreover there were also a shop and shambles, implying retail trade including the slaughter of cattle and the sale of meat.   Nowadays we ensure that slaughter houses are kept well away from public view, but our ancestors were far less squeamish and it was a regular thing for the shambles [which often gave their name to a street] to be situated right in the centre of the town.   William Doddington would probably not have been involved in the slaughter, nor indeed in the day to day trading, but is more likely to have been the middleman who rented out the various facilities to different traders.

In the absence of measured drawings it is difficult to say just how large the Cross House was; it appears on the 1848 Tithe Map, property of the Duchy, square in plan and stretching nearly half way across the space between the Angel Inn and the corner of Manor Road.  There are, however, two XIXC. illustrations from which some reconstruction is possible.  In 1827 John Buckler, the water colour artist visited Mere at the time that he was making pictures for Colt Hoare; his water colours of St. Michael’s Church are well known, but there is also a similar picture by him of the Market Cross^[ii] as seen from a standpoint on the South side roughly at the doorway of the present supermarket [then the Angel Inn].  It shows a rectangular two-storey building with a high gable end and with substantial buttresses at the four corners.  On the south front there is one small window, at ground floor level, and a wide archway which hints at the presence of a stairway behind it; there is a single chimney stack, presumably for a first floor fireplace.  At the East End the ground floor has a pair of archways which like that on the South side have pointed heads indicative of mediaeval origin, and at first floor level is a triple lighted window with a highly decorative panel above, surmounted by a diamond shaped clock face.  On the gable end is a decorative weather vane.  One has to remember that complete accuracy cannot be guaranteed and Buckler’s painting, which indeed does take a few liberties with perspective, must be regarded with this reservation.  The building also features in what must be one of the earliest photographs of Mere^[iii]. This shows the building much as depicted by Buckler, though the two arches at the East end are wider with less pointed heads, and with a far narrower central pillar, and the clock has a round face.  The first impression is that one looks through the arches and then clear through some opening at the rear to the end of the George Inn, but sketches of 1860, one of which could well be by William Lander all show double doors to each archway, and it could be that notices fixed to these doors may give the effect of a clear view through. From this one can estimate a width of the building of some 25 feet.  There are drawings of the building, some of which fairly clearly are based on this photo rather than being from life, and another which may be by William Lander.  All this evidence fits perfectly with the concept of a ground floor market area with a chapel above it.

An attempt has been made to resolve the differences between these various illustrations, and the accompanying  drawing by Dr.Colin Anderson must give a fairly accurate depiction of the original “Cross House”

We also have a small sketch^[iv] of the end window seen from the inside, with a suggestion  of a window on the North face. For this we are indebted to the Dorset poet William Barnes who, on first coming to Mere in 1823 rented the first floor of the Cross House for the school which he established.  He continued to occupy it until 1827, when, on his marriage, he took over Chantry House and ran the school there. His use of the Cross House is commemorated in a slate panel on the side of the present Clock Tower.  It must be admitted that other drawings by Barnes of local subjects are known to be of doubtful accuracy.

In 1888,  T.H.Baker recorded separately from the three volumes of notes in the possession of the Church extensive  comments on changes he had seen in Mere over his 30 years there^[v].  He refers to the removal of the stocks which stood  on the West side, where there was also an unsightly brick projection  housing the lock-up; neither would have appeared in any of the views we have, which are all from the other side.

A use made of the Cross House in later years was as the venue for the infrequent meetings of the Manorial Court.  These were purely formal occasions, needed to ratify the granting or renewal of leases and similar dealings in the properties of the Manor, many of which until the late XIXc were of Copyhold tenure, which involved the recording of the transaction in the Court books as evidence of ownership.    It is noticeable that in the 1850’s and early 60’s the minutes refer to the meeting having been opened in the Cross House, and then apparently immediately adjourned to the George Inn.  This adjournment will not have been for refreshment, but was rather because the old Cross House had become ruinous and unsuitable for use.   Since the early days of the Hanoverians the Manor of Mere had been “farmed” to members of the Schutz family of courtiers;  they would not have had any particular interest in the maintenance of a building with little or no commercial value. By 1863 the affairs of the Duchy had been set in order by the Prince Consort, and as a result the old building was demolished and the present rather insignificant replacement was given to the town.  Not for the first, or last, time, Mere lost a most interesting mediaeval building without any attempt at recording. 

 Originally the Market would have taken place in the Square, and would have included the buying and selling of cattle and of corn and other produce.  In this respect it was in direct competition with the markets of neighbouring communities, such as Gillingham, Shaftesbury, Wincanton, Warminster and Hindon.   Several of these markets were very active, and almost certainly trade drifted away from Mere to the more active venues.  We do not know when it finally died away as a farmers’ market, it had apparently ceased well before 1799, when notice was given by Giles Jupe, then Bailiff of the Manor, that a Toll-free Market for Corn and Cattle, sanctioned by the Surveyor-General to the Prince of Wales as Lord of the Manor, would commence on Tuesday January 7th 1800.  The notice added as an inducement that a good Ordinary [farmers’ lunch] would be on offer at the Ship at 1 o‘c.

It seems that this market may have been short-lived, as in 1817 at a meeting at the Ship Hotel, attended by some 41 farmers from the surrounding district, it was agreed that a Pitched Corn Market should be held on Tuesdays, later changed to Mondays .   That regular recorder of Mere life T.H.Baker, who was engaged in producing a study of farm prices over the years, records good business at the market for the first two years, but without any later reference.   Significantly the local papers while religiously reporting prices realised at the neighbouring large markets made no reference to that at Mere, and we can only assume that it was a short-lived affair.    However, in a talk to the Mere Church League in 1907 Baker relates having been told by Thomas Jupe, who died in 1887 after farming most of his life at Burton, that he recollected “sacks of corn being pitched from the old Market House to Mr. Edmund’s chemist’s shop” [i.e. the Triangle]. Baker referred in 1881 to there having been a weighbridge at the East end of the Marker House till its demolition.   One of  the postcards published by the well known  XXc Mere photographer  Frederick Holmes shows a group of farmers gathered round a small enclosure immediately to the West of the Clock Tower, intensely scrutinising a well developed dairy cow, standing on a weighbridge.  The Ordnance Survey map used by the Inland Revenue for the 1910 Valuation shows a small rectangle by the Tower.  There had previously been a weighbridge, operated by “The Mere Weighbridge Company”, an organisation whose proprietors have not so far been traced, on the corner of Castle Street and Barton Lane, on land part of the old Parsonage Farm, and it would seem that this must have been a successor to that at the Market House.  In 1887, after the freehold of this land had been acquired from the Ecclesiastical Commissioners by the Chafyn Grove Estate, it was sold at auction and a plot on this corner was described as the site of Mere Weighbridge and Office, the Company having been given notice to quit on 6th July 1887.   It seems that the Company came to an arrangement with the Duchy for the use of  the area West of the Clock Tower, presumably with the controls of the bridge being inside the Tower.   There is no trace at present of the date when the weighbridge was finally abandoned.  At the time of its installation, before the days of easy transport, such installations were common features of country communities, providing acceptable proof of the weight of cattle, corn, coal or other commodities.

The Clock Tower can hardly lay claim to great architectural merit, or indeed to any great utilitarian design, and we have to mourn the demolition without record of its predecessor.  However, for a time at least it must have been regarded as of some importance, at least by the civic leaders of the day.  When the Parish Council was established in 1894 the old Market House, then gone for 30 years,  was chosen to be the emblem on the new Common Seal, now held in the Museum;  it would appear that one of Lander’s drawings was used in drafting the design.  One suspects the influence of T.H.Baker, by that time a stalwart member of the Council in this choice.   In later years the new Clock Tower, now fully accepted as part of the street scene, was to become Mere’s “logo” and it is still used as a badge representing the town.   In 2003, as part of a scheme for the improvement of the area, the Tower was completely overhauled.

As habits changed, and with the gradual growth over the centuries of standards of life and purchasing power, traders forsook the simple stalls around the Tower for permanent shop-buildings, usually having their living quarters behind and above.   These shops were naturally grouped around the original market area, and have continued  so to this day.  In some cases it has been possible to trace the story of their occupancy over the years.   The centre of  Mere, however, from 1815 to the 1950’s, came to be dominated by a phenomenon almost unique for a small country town - the department store of Waltons’, which gradually absorbed most of the different shops in the Market Place.  Their story is related in number 2 of these papers and is therefore not repeated here except where further information has become available.   Similarly. as might be expected, four of the town’s Inns, two of which survive, were within a stone’s throw of the Clock Tower;  Their history has been described in Mere Papers number 5 [pp73-96] and only a few further facts which have since come to light are now included.

South of the Clock Tower a large frontage was taken up by the Angel Inn which finally closed  in 1969.  It has now been established that this site was originally Copyhold of the Duchy, being advertised as such when put to auction, together with the one acre of meadow at the rear.  T.H.Baker describes it as a long low building, running from Angel Lane to what is now Finan’s antique shop, with a gateway in the centre giving access to the yard and stables.  The copyhold of the whole site was owned by John Phillipps of Chadenwyck, but fell in hand on his death in 1881, when it went to auction; the inn was then bought by Archibald Beckett, of the Tisbury brewery, who demolished it all and rebuilt.   In spite of its original leading position amongst  its competitors, the collapse of the coaching trade mid XIXc led to a serious contraction in trade, and Beckett only retained a small portion at the Angel Lane end, which eventually was reduced merely to an off-licence, which closed in the 1990’s to become the Angel Cafe.  The neighbouring portion with the yard, now an  ironmongery, became that typically late Victorian institution, a Temperance Hotel^[vi].  Various other parts found new uses, some rooms for a time becoming an Institute and Reading Room under the auspices of the Parish Church. More significantly,  the Eastern portion, for quite a time not rebuilt, was acquired by the local Conservative party who built the Victoria Hall there as their contribution to the Diamond Jubilee; the foundation stone laid by Lady Folkestone survives to tell the story.  For a long time in addition to the various functions that might have been expected , the Hall was the venue for Mere’s first and only cinema, operated by Mr. Charles Jeans of Salisbury Street.   The Hall eventually met the same fate as many others throughout the country in the face of competition from more sophisticated forms of entertainment and recreation.   When it finally closed it was acquired by Mr. David Chalke, the garage proprietor, and was for some years a car show room.  In 1990 a supermarket was opened there, later taken over by the Co-operative movement, half a century after the closure of the town’s own Co-operative Society’s shops in Salisbury Street.  

Next to the Victoria Hall site stands a two storey building with attic dormers, shown in 1848 as ”House, Garden and shop”, owned and occupied by John Curtis.  Almost certainly there has been a business on the site since the early XVIIIc when it was owned by the Hooper family who operated there as linen & woollen drapers, mercers and grocers and who probably built the attractive mahogany framed shop window which is still such an attractive feature of the street scene.   When a Miss Hooper gave up the business in 1812 it was taken over by a John Curtis, whose father had made his fortune in Fordingbridge, according to T.H.Baker^[vii]. Curtis passed it on to his nephew Lucius Curtis Matthews on whose death it was taken by his widow, who then married George Athoe, a grocer from Pembroke.  The business thus continued until 1894, when the death of Athoe gave John Walton the opportunity to acquire the premises for his expanding empire and install the ironmongery side of his business there.   On the final splitting up of Waltons this shop continued as an ironmongers, R. & M. Cockrams, though in 1990 they transferred the business to the shop portion of the old Angel site.   At some stage the Western half of the building was separated as a private house.  The shop portion now houses the business of Robert Finan, auctioneer and valuer specialising in antiques, who has painstakingly refurbished the shop front.

Next to the East is Squires’ greengrocery  shop, housed in an Edwardian style gabled building, on a site which also has a history of having housed a grocery business prior to its acquisition by  Waltons in 1940 for incorporation into their ironmongery .    In 1848 it was part of a site, Duchy of Cornwall Copyhold land, owned by William Keeping, a farmer, with this portion occupied by Thomas Down, a grocer, son of John Down the edge-tool maker of Edge Bridge.  Down disposed of his business to another local man, John Charlton, whose widow was trading as a grocer there in 1891.    At some time prior to this the Copyhold had been acquired by the neighbour Athoe, whose tenant the Charltons became.   Other records suggest that by 1881 Athoe was in financial difficulties, and in that year he decided to sell these various properties in the Square to the Rev Ernest Borradaile,an unbeneficed Anglican minister who lived at Castle House and had built up a portfolio of property investments in Mere.  For some years he and his family occupied significant positions in the society of the town.

By this time the Duchy was withdrawing from its copyhold investments such as this, and to facilitate the sale by Athoe they sold him the freehold interest,  and in the Deed  for that transaction we have for the first time a description of the property as “two cottages with gardens, one approx 5 perches in the occupation of Thomas James Dore [it seems probable that this was a misreading of Down  MFT] and the other adjoining with garden, yard &c occupied by Mrs.Charlton”.

The Charltons were joined by a Surrey family, the Applins, one of whom, Albert Arthur, came to assist Mrs. Charlton and by 1905 he had taken over the business, advertising as  “Grocers, Drapers & Milliners, all the latest novelties in childrens overalls and crash coats, Ladies Silk Blouses, Boys Outfitting” &c &c”.   The business was still run from the two small cottages, and we are fortunate to have two drawings of their original appearance, which even in 1900 must have seemed old-fashioned though typical of how the whole town had appeared a few decades earlier. 

The building finally acquired by Applin appears in both an early photograph and also in a drawing and print by one of the Landers in 1860 as a low built thatched house with a strange little extension bay window at ground floor level.  Around 1900 Harold Edmunds, son of the chemist, looking out of the window of their rooms over the shop in the old Triangle building opposite drew a pen & ink sketch of Applin’s shop which in 1910 he put in his sister’s birthday book, with his mother Unity adding to it one of the rather naive poems with which she regularly bombarded Mere.   Space does not permit quotation of all seven verses of “The Last Thatched House in Mere Market Place”, but the third verse  gives the flavour.

Windows and panes are wide and high in the modern house;

Cramped and small are they in old, under roof quite close.

The new, like face, Open and Bold, no fear in the eye,

The other coy, shading the eyes retiring and shy,

Yes shy though old, not half so bold

As modern homes in the Market Place.

Originally the site had been only part of a larger plot which included both the house immediately to the East and the cottage which is now the Post Office, but as we have seen became separated, and around 1903 it must have become obvious that such delightful thatched cottages were quite unsuitable for XXc business, and Applin arranged a mortgage to enable him to demolish the old building and erect the present one, described in 1903 as “The newly erected Dwelling House and Shop”, and continued to trade there. By the 1920’s the Applins appear to have dropped the drapery side of the business, advertising as well as grocery, fruit &c “Refreshment & Tea Rooms, Confectionery and Ice Cream”.   They continued to trade there until 1940, when they sold up to Waltons, who incorporated the shop into their ironmongery next door.  When this was finally disposed of  the shop was sold to Mr. & Mrs. Squire who had previously been running their greengrocery business at another former Waltons shop across the road, originally the home of Henry Hindley referred to later.s.

Next to the East is a stone built house, set back to a different building line, whose brick quoins suggest a date around the turn of the XXc.   Now a private house, it has a door at the West end of the frontage, and a large archway, now filled in, which must have once housed double doors to trade premises.   Originally part of the same site as Applins, it had been split off by the 1910 valuation, when it was owned by Mrs. M.A.Borradaile, widow of the Rev. Ernest Borradaile, who presumably had acquired it at the same time as the neighbouring property referred to below. In 1910 it was shown as being occupied by Arthur Lloyd Coward, builder and decorator, whose trade sign can be seen protruding over the pavement in a photograph of the time.   Not long after this, A.L. Coward moved to the property “Milestones” in Castle Street, where he had his yard at the rear.  It was there that  his two sons, on returning from the 1914/18 War, set up the business which was to become the Hill Brush Company.  In 1925 Mr. Bert Stainer, a member of a Shaftesbury family of bakers, had opened a bakery at South View, Hazzards Hill, and in 1932 he transferred shop bakery and house to what had been Coward’s site.    The business finally closed in 1978, but members of the family still live in the house. Next to this last property come the Post Office and its adjoining house.  These were plots 486 & 487 on the Tithe Map, Duchy copyhold, owned like the Applin site, by William Keeping, and occupied by Thomas Down.  Down appears on the 1851 census as a grocer [this seems to have been a very popular trade at that time, and it is pretty certain that many of those using the title were in fact just running the traditional “corner shop”].  The property was eventually one of many owned by Edward Austin Card, manager of the Wilts and Dorset Bank, Mere, who bought it from the Duchy in 1888, described as “30 perches of ground with cottage“.  In 1890 he sold it to one Eliza Coward, who shortly after sold it to the Rev Ernest Borradaile, and it remained the property of his widow till 1921 when it was sold to Stanley Cowley.  Later it was bought by Mr. Brewer, formerly landlord of the “Talbot”, who opened an “Arrow” foodmarket at the front of the cottage  Eventually in 1985 it was acquired by the late Andrew Young, general manager of Waltons, who, on the final break-up of that business  took over the Post Office and built a PO and stores at the side, where there had originally only been an iron shed.   The business is still continued there by his widow, Jean Young.

Returning to the centre of the town, almost the whole of the North side of the Market Place was taken up eventually by the different departments of Waltons.   Starting from the West end, first was Charles Card’s original shop [now a supermarket], and then various other small traders’ premises were acquired, making a continuous frontage to what is now the pharmacy.  Waltons did not make unnecessary alterations to their acquisitions; whilst the first shop was given a Victorian shop front at an early stage, the remainder presents virtually the original frontage.   The premises next door to the supermarket, now a charity shop, were initially Charles Card’s house and were then occupied by the Walton family until they moved next door, when it became the Post Office, which it remained until the 1960’s.  The handsome building next to the East, with its Venetian windows, has a particularly interesting history, as having in the XVIIIc been the house and warehouse of Henry Hindley, the linen merchant more fully described  in Mere Paper no 3 “Silver Threads”.  By 1848 it had been bought by John Jupe senior, the linen merchant father-in-law of Charles Card; on the death of his daughter Judith it was taken by the vicar as a house for a succession of his curates, and was eventually acquired by John Walton for his private residence, with the ground floor becoming the board room and offices of Waltons.     After the closure of  Waltons it had various uses, finally becoming a charity shop - a sad reflection of the falling away in the prospects of  independent traders in small country towns.  At the time of writing the whole building has been acquired by Mr. Robert Finan, whose intention is to restore it to its original state, in the same way that he has restored the building across the street.

Next to Hindley’s former house stands a pair of large stone houses, now containing flats and a Chinese takeaway on a site with an interesting history.   It had been owned by the Marquis of Bath’s Longleat Estate since the time of the Dissolution; with the accompanying farm land in two closes, Lynch Close and Hurdles, in Water Street, now long built over, it became  the only property in Mere the estate held.   The Marquis’ ancestor Sir John Thynne, had obtained from the Crown a number of local properties which had been the endowment of Berkeley’s chantry, and this was probably one of them, though it is equally possible that it might have belonged to another of the various ecclesiastical bodies whose properties Thynne obtained at the time. Some of the properties were disposed of, but this little parcel was retained, and we learn that in 1663 the site was leased as “The White Hart Inn”.  Previously references have been found to an early “Hart” inn in Mere, but only now can it be confirmed as being on this site.  By 1678 it was let to Richard Madox as “a ruinous messuage &c heretofore called The Hart,” with closes called Hurdles and Lynch Close and land on Castle Hill. In August 1764 a Messuage called the White Hart Inn was leased by the 3rd Viscount Bath to James Harding of Mere, woollen draper at a rent of £1.18.= pa. ^[viii].   This is the  John Harding who became the leading linen merchant and whose business was taken over by his manager and neighbour Henry Hindley.  He must have closed the Inn and used the building as his home and warehouse. On his death it passed to his niece Mrs Hicks Beach, still on lease from Longleat, and in 1810 it had reopened as an inn under its old name, and was leased for 99 years to members of the Burfitt family; by 1848 inn and land had devolved upon Christopher Rose, a farmer married to John Burfitt’s daughter. However,  with the end of the coaching trade the inn did not prosper and the freehold was sold to Charles Card in 1860, who sold off the outlying land to Charles Jupe, demolishing the Inn and building the two houses we now see on the site. The larger of these Card retained till his death in 1875 as his private residence.  In 1877 it was let to Richard Rodman, a schoolmaster who had been operating an “Academy” in Bourton for some time which he transferred to Mere under the title of “Castle Hill Academy”; in 1881 he had resident staff and 27 boarders; by 1891 this venture seems to have disappeared, and the house was bought by Mrs. Caroline Jupe, widow of Robert Jupe and a daughter of Charles Card.  The other house was taken for some years by E.P.Mitchell of Manor Farm, another son-in-law of Charles Card, and a succession of tenants included Ernest Baker, brother of the historian, and for a time Rodman occupied both houses..   Eventually both houses were bought by John Walton  and incorporated into the store, housing the men‘s outfitting departments  and others.   The Chinese takeaway is the only commercial use since that time, except that for a short while in the early 1990’s the Eastern house was a restaurant/private hotel under the title “Welcome House”.

Next to the East, and effectively ending the commercial sector of the Square is the pharmacy, a tall building whose staring Gillingham brickwork fails to harmonise with the mellow stonework of the rest of the town centre.   T.H.Baker described its predecessor as “a remarkable specimen of a XVc shop”. It must have been demolished not long after he wrote those words; Mere Museum has a pencil drawing, the authorship of which is unknown, though it could well be the work of Baker’s daughter.   It depicts a small two-storey stone cottage with a steeply pitched  thatched roof and is captioned “Old House in Market Place, Mere 1885” in Baker’s handwriting.  There are two windows to the upper floor, and beneath them a ?tiled? canopy runs the whole width of the building, sheltering the single door and a series of ground floor windows.  Along the fascia is the legend “Foot late Maidment, Corn Factor, Baker &c”.  This, and the old Applins premises must have been typical of the majority of the buildings of the town centre; many of the existing stone built houses and cottages , though now roofed in slate or tile, have steeply pitched roof profiles indicative of original thatching.

In 1848 this Duchy copyhold property appears as 1264, House, Garden and Shop, owner James Maidment, occupier James Shepherd.   At the rear the site goes back to North Street, then known as Back Lane, and includes as well as the building’s own narrow width land at the rear of the three houses to the East, which have only very short gardens. It seems likely that these houses, then owned and occupied respectively by E.F.Maidment, John Glover and Edwin Thompson, were carved out of the main site.

The Maidments were a very old Mere family with many ramifications connected with many other Mere lines.  According to Baker the bakery & corn business was owned by Matthew Maidment and then by his son Edmund Ford Maidment, who died in 1867, when the business was taken over his son-in-law, Mr. Legg, the Relieving Officer, who before long passed it on to Henry Foot, of another local family, who appears in later directories as a baker.   Maidment’s daughter Mary married into the Curtis family of bakers across the road.   At some time around 1900 the old building was demolished and the present brick shop erected; for some time it was a tobacconists, barbers  confectioners &c before acquisition by Waltons, who eventually moved their pharmacy business [previously Edmonds] from Castle Street. It remains a pharmacy but under independent ownership.

The three houses shown on the Tithe Map on land probably once all part of the last property remain today as small private houses, stone built with steeply pitched roofs recalling their original thatch.  In no way do they present the appearance of a terrace, but instead have individual roof-lines each lower than its neighbour to its West.  There is no evidence that they have ever housed any trade activities, and they provide a distinctive break before the earlier shopping area resumes in Salisbury Street.

The building is tile roofed in a style considerably later than the main structure; this probably dates from the time when the whole roof line was raised to give a second floor, and the interior gives clear evidence of its original unity.  An A-frame in the roof bears, in pencil, the date 1865 and the initials E.H. & S.M., presumably of workmen engaged in the re-roofing.  Remnants of thatch survive internally indicating the original eaves level.  The whole property was sold in 1862 to Charles Jupe, the silk throwster,  so this dating would put the alterations into the period after the sale by the Toogoods.

In 1885 Jupe’s son, Isaiah Maggs Jupe sold the property to Thomas Standerwick, son of William who had owned the Triangle.  Standerwick died in 1933 still owning both houses, and in 1954 his trustees  sold them to Mrs. Fanny Sims, of Sandells, Water Street.  In 1944 Philip Welch was tenant of Birchlea and Mrs. Burd of the other house.   In 1963 Birchlea was sold to the Hill Brush Company Limited, but the other house was retained by the Sims family who then lived there; by 1977 it is referred to as “Sportsmans Lodge”, a name presumably given it by them for some reason not now known.

A feature of both of the houses was once a small cast-iron canopy over their front doors, though at present only the one on Birchlea survives. They appear clearly in a photograph c.1900, and are interesting in that they would seem to have been a common feature of late XIXc building in Mere.  Another survives at  “Hatherleigh” a bit farther down the Lane, and they appear on early photographs of the Manse, opposite, and of a number of houses in both Castle Street and Salisbury Street.   Their presence in such numbers in the local scene may suggest a local provenance, such as the Bourton Foundry.  

Dark Lane, a narrow alley, continuing the alignment of Boar Street, is a reminder that until the late XVIIIc there was very little wheeled traffic in the area and as a result no call for wide roads.  To connect Water Street with the town centre a narrow lane such as this was quite sufficient for foot traffic and the occasional packhorse.  However, Dark Lane was never more than a short cut; there is little evidence of it having given rear or side access to properties fronting the principal streets.   At this point the road bears off to the right, and becomes Pettridge Lane, crossing the Sheen Water at Edge Bridge, and then branching into Clements Lane, later Woodlands Road, and the Causeway, the road to Shaftesbury, which is the subject of another paper in this series.