Northamptonshire has long been associated with the manufacture of shoes and boots. The village of Wollaston, where I am today, is the home of Dr. Marten’s boots. You might assume that I was more interested in that than in the fact that it had a road called Bell End. You don’t know me that well, then.
Bell End, a road called Bell End. I mean, would you buy a house here? I would: Adrian Bleese, 1 Bell End, Wollaston, Northamptonshire, NN29 7RN. That’s an address and, very possibly, an accurate assessment of the way many see me.
The road itself is only a little over a hundred yards long. Walls built in the local pale stone dominate the start of the street with one modern house, built in the same stone, and a row of small, whitewashed cottages sitting at right angles to Bell End. Halfway down the street, stood by the pale green door in the wall which is the entrance to 15 Bell End, you get a glimpse of a thatched roof and the pointed steeple of St. Mary’s church. There could not be a more English view over a wall.
On the corner of Bell End is a red brick building. It was obviously once a pub but is now an Indian restaurant. Over the front door it says “The Secret Is at the Table” but given that all the first floor windows have their curtains drawn in the middle of the day and one pane of glass is missing where the cable from the satellite dish enters, the rest stuffed with a black bin bag, I fear that the secret lies elsewhere. That is Bell End.
It's not the only road in Britain with a rude name and I think you would be disappointed if I didn’t tell you about a few more. Kings Sutton in Oxfordshire has a handful of semi-detached houses and a bungalow opposite a play park on a road called The Knob. The Knob is quite short, longer than Bell End, obviously, but still shorter than you might hope.
The Lincolnshire village of Ludford has a Fanny Hands Lane which comprises just five bungalows and a good few smirks. These are all quite short roads, though. Not so Slag Lane which takes you from the marina on the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in Leigh all the way to the Hare and Hounds pub in Warrington, one and a half miles away.
Who knows what might be going on behind the net curtains of the respectable Victorian villas in Hornyold Road in Malvern, Worcestershire? Shepshed in Leicestershire has a Butthole Lane which crosses the M1 just north of junction twenty-three. In Walthamstow, the Forest Trading Estate is on Hookers Road.
There is both a Back Passage and a Cock Lane in the City of London. In the 18th century, Cock Lane had a famous ghost called Scratching Fanny. Not far away from this, Love Lane might seem romantic but gained its name as it was the place to go to find ladies of the night in years gone by. As was, what is now known as, Grape Lane in York. Grap was an old English spelling of grope and this throughfare was once known as Grapcunt Lane.
Having lowered the tone substantially, I will head back to Wollaston and Northamptonshire and try harder to sound like a respectable, responsible travel writer.
Wollaston is a large village of thatched, honey-coloured houses and streets too narrow for cars, with a population of a little over three and a half thousand. It sits in rural Northamptonshire close to the junction of two Roman roads. The village derives its name from the Saxon chief Wulflaf.
Northamptonshire is a county that always surprises me, it’s always far better than I expect it to be. It sounds vaguely Midlandsey, as though it should be industrial and smoggy but most of it isn’t. I guess the reason that it feels part of the Midlands is because it sort of is. It’s right next to Leicester and Coventry and it’s only twenty-five miles from the county boundary to the outskirts of Birmingham. The trouble with the county, or perhaps the most marvellous thing about it, is that it’s also on the edge of lots of other places.
It’s about as far from its eastern edge to Cambridge as it is from the west to Birmingham. The county almost touches Milton Keynes and it is nextdoor neighbour to Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. It takes less than a quarter of an hour to drive from Northamptonshire to the Cotswolds and the architecture of the county and the names of the villages, particularly in the south-west, reflect that. Stand on Mill Lane in Chipping Warden, outside Ivy Cottage, looking over toward the stone-built church and the manor house behind its sturdy wall which, like a good deal of Northamptonshire, looks as though it might be built of flapjacks. You would think that you were already in the Cotswolds but you would be firmly inside Northamptonshire.
The county, known, apparently, as “The Rose of the Shires”, despite the fact that at least two other shires are better known for having roses, sits in a liminal position between the north and the south and even between the east and the west. It borders eight other counties: Warwickshire, Rutland, Leicestershire, Bedfordshire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire and finally, with a border which stretches just twenty yards, Lincolnshire.
There is little evidence of settlement here until the late iron age with hillforts appearing at Arbury, Borough Hill, Castle Dykes, Guilsborough, Irthlingborough, Hunsbury Hill, Rainsborough and Thenford; most the county being the lands of the Catuvellauni. The name of the tribe meant “excelling in battle” which was a lovely idea but proved to be less than accurate on the arrival of the Romans in 43 AD.
The last king of the Catuvellauni was Caractacus who led the resistance to the invading armies. He was captured and paraded through the streets of Rome as part of a triumphal parade celebrating their victory over Britannia. After this, he made a speech to the Senate which was such a hit that he and his family were freed and allowed to live a peaceful life in Rome.
Imagine that. You’re born in the drizzle and mud of Iron Age Britain, most likely in the Catuvellauni capital of Colchester. Your big brother dies in battle and suddenly you find yourself King. You then spend seven years fighting a bitter guerrilla war against the invaders before Cartimandua, essentially Queen of Yorkshire, double-crosses you and hands you over to the Romans. Taken to Rome you are ridiculed and expect to be put to death but you manage to talk your way out of it and, by telling the Romans just how brilliant they are. Then you get to spend the rest of your life in the sunshine drinking wine and eating grapes. I bet he’d have handed himself in a good deal sooner if he’d known.
After leaving Northamptonshire, I headed for my hotel for the night: Chicheley Hall in Buckinghamshire. It wasn’t the kind of place where I’d usually be able to stay but it had only recently opened as a hotel and so the rooms were fantastically cheap.
Even then my room was in the old stable block; I know my place and, apparently, so do hotel receptionists. Chicheley Hall is a wonderful early eighteenth-century Baroque country house built for Sir John Chester, 6th Baronet of Chicheley who was member of parliament for Bedfordshire between 1741 and 1747.
He was clearly keen to impress as the house is just magnificent. As you turn in through the gates and crunch up the long, tree-lined drive, the house is partly visible, the centre section promising more splendour which is only revealed as you emerge from the trees. It is brick built, three storeys with nine tall, white-framed, muntinned and mullioned windows on each floor, those on the attic level being slightly smaller.
Each window comprising up to sixteen individual small panes of glass. There’s just the hint of a basement level peeking out from behind a low hedge in front of the house. Six huge, stone Corinthian pilasters separate the façade of the house into five bays, the middle one, with three rows of windows on the top two levels and two and a door on the ground floor, projects slightly. I wish that architecture had the terms to describe how beautiful this house is. Inside is all marble pillars and oak panels and staircases. It sits in a hundred acres of parkland with a lake and even a canal. It is the most glorious place.
A manor house used to stand on this site and Cardinal Wolsey gave the manor to Christ Church, Oxford but, when Wolsey fell out with Henry VIII – a very bad idea – the Crown claimed Chicheley. A wool merchant called Anthony Cave acquired the land and built the first house here in 1545. His daughter, Judith, inherited it and lived there with her husband, William Chester, who was her cousin. It’s marriages like that that gave us the aristocracy we have today.
During the English Civil War the house was severely damaged by Parliamentary forces and was eventually demolished in 1719. The current house was built for Sir John Chester, great, great grandson of Judith and William, between 1719 and 1723. All that is left of the old manor house being some panelling and an Elizabethan over-mantel. It seems that Sir John, in correspondence with a friend of his, the wonderfully monikered Burrell Massingberd, designed a lot of the house. However, it was probably the master builder Francis Smith of Warwick who was responsible for bringing all of the beautiful ideas together in one place. However, William Kent, a protégé of both Chester and Massingberd, undoubtedly brought his artistic eye to Chicheley and designed much of the detail and interior.
The 86,900 bricks for the hall were made on site by Samuel Burgen who charged five shillings and sixpence per thousand bricks plus the cost of the lime, in total receiving £30 12s 6d for his work. Francis Smith received £50 for tearing down the old house and £638 for building the new one. That was, by no means, the cost of the house, though. The staircase was created by the joiner, Francis Baxter and his bill, in April 1723, was for £90 - just for the staircase, that’s about sixteen grand today. The plastering around the staircase and in the main hall cost £108, however Sir John considered plasterer Isaac Mansfield’s rates to be “very high”.
Sir John, it seems, did not need to rush the building of Chicheley Hall because he was, at the time, living at Shenton Hall, the home of his first wife’s mother who, given where today’s journey started, was rather pleasingly called Mrs Wollaston. His wife had died in 1704 but Sir John stayed on. It is not recorded how keen Mrs Wollaston was to get Chicheley Hall built.
The house stayed in the Chester family for most of the next two centuries but was often rented out, in part because the Chester family was no longer the Chester family. The drunken 7th Baronet having bequeathed the house to a friend and incredibly distant relative, Charles Bagot on the condition that he used the name Chester. of course, he did. Well, you would, wouldn’t you? The 7th Baronet died when he fell from a second storey window.
During the Second World War, the house was used as a training school for the Special Operations Executive. The SOE was a top secret unit set up by the British in the summer of 1940 to operate in occupied Europe . They carried out surveillance and sabotage behind enemy lines. By the autumn of 1940 their headquarters had moved to 64 Baker Street in London, earning them the nickname The Baker Street Irregulars after Conan Doyle’s famous undercover intelligence agents who worked for Sherlock Holmes. Eventually around thirteen thousand people, including more than three thousand women, were part of the SOE.
Sometimes they would parachute in but, quite often, they would arrive at night in a Westland Lysander of 161 Squadron from RAF Tempsford in Bedfordshire. The single pilot would not only fly the aircraft but navigate, too, and would have to find not a city or an airport but a single field in occupied France. Then, after landing by the light of just three torches laid out by agents on the ground, would turn around and take off again having dropped off passengers and stores and often collected people and cargo in less than three minutes.
After the war, the house was owned by the Beatty family before being sold to the Royal Society in 2007 for six and a half million quid, they spent a further twelve million pounds restoring the hall and creating bedrooms in the stable block.
The Royal Society has been around for longer than the house, holding its very first meeting on a Sunday in late November 1660. It is a Fellowship of many of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence anywhere on earth. Its purpose is to recognise, promote, and support excellence in science and to encourage the development and use of science for the benefit of humanity.
So many achievements are linked to the Royal Society, from the coining of the word cell in a biological sense in 1665 through the publishing of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica and the backing of the expedition on which James Cook first reached Australia, all the way up to Crick and Watson’s discovery of DNA in 1953. Their motto is Nullius in verba which essentially, is the same motto as Fox Mulder from the X-Files, it means “take no-one’s word for it”. Eighteen and a half million for a house might seem like a lot but the Society gives out around forty-two million every year to researchers.
The house was sold by the Royal Society just a couple of months before I stayed here, perhaps the low room tariff was to attract customers and, as I said, they put me in the stables. These were completed in 1725 at a cost of £217 9s 4d plus a tip of ten guineas to Francis Smith for good work. My room was very comfortable and spacious and looked out, through bullseye-glassed windows, over the walled garden and the church.
Oh, by the way, Buckinghamshire has a Cock Lane in High Wycombe. There’s a Dick’s Way in Aylesbury. It is also home to educational robot manufacturer, Swallow Systems.
Next week, I go to explore the countryside and find myself in Bedlam.
Thanks Holly. Next week we head to Bedlam.
Ha! Great post, my friend. Had a few lovely laughs and felt like I was taking a stroll with you.