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29 Long Acre East is a neat double-fronted
Edwardian Villa built in 1910 for an insurance agent, Henry
Thompson, as evidenced by the stone on the west gable wall
bearing both date and initials. The land had formed part of
an ancient pasture called Parr’s Close, part of which
had been used to build East Cottage next door some thirty
years earlier. The parcel of land on which Oak Villa stands
was sold at the same time as the land for East Cottage but
seems not to have been built upon then. It was not, as might
first be imagined from the position of the house, sold off
from East Cottage. It remained in the Thompson family until
1966.
Deduction is the name of the game researching
29 Long Acre East! The house has a builder’s stone in
the west gable wall with the date 1910 and initials HT carved
on it. Documents for East Cottage
next door, reveal the true history of ownership of the land
and we have to deduce some of the later history!
In April 1810 a William Chettle, farmer
and grazier of Thornley, Cambridgeshire inherited a piece
of land called Parr’s Close
from John Chettle, grazier of Bingham. Chettle’s son,
known as William Chettle Senior, a farmer of Bingham, had
inherited the close at some point and possibly around 2nd
January 1837 (the first deed document available for East Cottage)
sold part of the close to William Sills.
The first document in the deed bundle
for number 29 is dated 28 April 1921, by which time the house
had existed for over ten years. That document records the
sale for £90 of a piece of freehold of land in Bingham.
A bricklayer named Arthur Victor Clipstone, formerly of Bingham
but then of Rotherham, sold the land to Henry Thompson, Insurance
Agent – so here we have our HT for whom Clipstone probably
built the house.
One’s first impression is that
the house stands on land split off from East Cottage after
the latter was built. When you look at the actual properties
it seems a reasonable assumption, but it is not what happened!
Clipstone may have bought the whole plot from Swanwick intending
to build two houses. In the event he built only one house
on half the plot and sold the land and the house we assume
he built to Thompson. He presumably retained the other half
of the plot, which he sold to Thompson in 1921 restoring the
Oak Villa plot back to its former size. The documents for
this initial purchase are missing.
The schedule describing the piece of
land sold in 1921 is reproduced in full below and it requires
careful reading – our interpretation is in small italics:-
Piece of land in Long Acre containing
one rood (a quarter of an acre – 1210 square yards)
being half of a larger piece of land containing two roods
(formerly said to contain two roods one perch and said to
have been at the south west corner (this looks very much like
but is not the land of East Cottage, the area noted in those
deeds, is two roods and two perches) of and forming part of
a field called Parr’s Close) and which piece of land
now being described is bounded
westwardly by land belonging
to the Earl of Carnarvon and formerly occupied by one Robert
Green and now by his grandson Robert Green (This is a piece
of land east of and then part of Donkey Green’s Cottage,
now number 25)
southwards by Long Acre (note not yet called
Long Acre East) to which it has a frontage of 41 feet or thereabouts
eastwardly by the remaining half of the said
larger piece of land as sometime conveyed by William Harold
Swanwick (the land forming East Cottage was sold to George
Shepherd. Swanwick’s predecessor, William Sills, bought
the piece next to it. Thus the plot forming the eastern boundary
described here is the eastern part of the two rood plot sold
to Sills at the same time as the East Cottage plot was sold
to Shepherd) Thus this land is actually west of Oak Villa,
was half of the land originally bought by the builder Clipstone
and is being purchased to add to the existing plot. Thus the
original plot is restored!)
and northwards by a public footpath on a
close of land belonging to the Earl of Carnarvon and now occupied
by Luke Stafford
and the same piece of land now being described was formerly
in the occupation of said W H Swanwick and now in that of
Henry Clarke.
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The succession of OS
maps shows how Swanwick’s plot was divided. 1883
shows East Cottage as parcel number 325 and measuring
.487 acres. Parcel 324 next door is .499 acres, virtually
the same size as East Cottage. Parcel 324 is next door
to Donkey Green Cottage, confirming the original land
description. By 1915 parcel 324 (now 199) has been split
into two, measuring in total .505 acres. The eastern portion
shows Oak Villa, the western portion has no development.
Henry Thompson died in 1940 and the house passed to his
son. The Assent, dated 17 January 1941, granted to Charles
Henry Thompson actually deals with three distinct entities
making up the property: |
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1 land as previously described
but bounded towards the east by hereditaments now of Misses
Ann Bolton and Alice Maud Bolton (see East
Cottage for how they inherited) and on the west by land
hereinafter secondly described (2 below) (eastern portion
of the original plot)
2 dwelling house “Oak Villa” erected on the
land (described in 1) together with outbuildings etc
3 all that piece of land situate and having a frontage of
41 feet to Long Acre Bingham hereinafter described (the
deed repeats the description given in the 1921 deed) and
containing one rood bounded northwards by a footpath etc
(western part of the original plot)
The third entity is the piece purchased
in 1921 (the other half of the original plot) and indeed more
recently was sold off to build number 27 Long Acre!
C H Thompson sold the property
to Anthony Shipman of 29 Carnarvon place in 1966 for £2600.
In 1941 he sold a 240 square yard plot in the North east corner
to Mr Hinde, a neighbour to extend his garden. In 1978 Shipman
sold to the present owners. |
