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Formerly known as Newgate Street Farm
and in the mid fifties ‘Shirley House’, Number
8 is a traditional East Midlands three storey Georgian farmhouse
of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. Narrow
2¼ inch bricks suggest some age. The land directly
attached to the farmhouse once included the whole of what
is now Gillotts Close, named for the farming family here in
Victorian times. Chapel Close, now a row of modern houses
numbers 2 to 6 Newgate Street, used to abut the property and
it is possible that the tenements here housed workers at the
farm. Bricked up spaces in the wall between the farmyard and
the yard seem to suggest this. Various farm outbuildings survive
to the rear of number 8 and at the front of number 10.
Like all Bingham’s farmhouses and
much other property, Newgate Street Farm was part of the Shelford
Estate of the Earls of Chesterfields and after (by marriage)
the Earls of Carnarvon. Following the death in 1923 of the
5th Earl of Carnarvon the Bingham estates passed in 1925 to
the crown in lieu of death duties and have since been administered
by the Crown Estates. The earl reserved to himself and his
heirs all mineral rights below 600 feet and covenanted to
pay any death duties that would become payable on the death
of his mother, the Dowager Lady Almina.
As with other Estate properties no written
records are available until the properties reach the open
market. The Crown Estate Commissioners sold the whole property
in 1952 for £3500 to one Fred Bower, described as a
Road Haulier. He obtained planning permission for a development
of light industry and warehousing on what is now Gillotts
Close, but for reasons that are not clear at present the plan
was changed to a small housing estate. Could that have commanded
a higher price?
Bower sold the house minus the
Gillotts Close area to Mr and Mrs Heafford, of the family
that owned Hardstaff and Brown in the thirties. They passed
on the piece of land on the corner of Gillotts Close to their
son to build a house, number 10. The front garden to that
property contains an old barn with a primitive but readable
date picked out in dark header bricks on the west gable end
-1817. There are also old stables to the farm in the same
garden. The present owners purchased the property in 1991.
During renovations they discovered several uncompleted copies
of a form issued to all householders in 1814 on which they
were to record names and details of all male occupants between
the ages of 18 and 45, presumably in preparation for call
up for the Napoleonic war.
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