The drawing shows how the
house might have looked around the early 1700s. It belonged
to the Needham
family, and was excluded from the sale to the developers of
Market Street. Similar
houses in the district suggest the position of the single door;
symmetry was unimportant in such buildings before the Georgian
era. The top floor windows may or may not have had the thatch
‘eyebrow’ arrangement. The attached cottage with
cart entrance is a view of how the present post office building
could have looked if it was there! It is shown as a farm worker’s
cottage. The present
house gives every appearance of being 18th century or earlier.
It is built of narrow brick. The former steep pitch of the
roof (the newer brickwork providing the newer more gentle
pitch can be easily seen) and the end parapets almost certainly
indicate it would originally have been thatched. The curious
circle in brick high on the west gable wall may be a bull’s-eye
which was a popular decorative device of the late seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries with no apparent function.
The roof seems to have been raised to give more headroom in
the second storey, possibly previously attic, rooms. The two
plat bands - the string courses standing proud of the front
wall - indicate that the original house did have three floors
(or perhaps two and a half storeys), as these features usually
delineated one floor from another. There are many examples
of single and some double plat bands in other villages and
towns around Bingham (notably Newark, Screveton and Bulcote.
The house at Screveton is built of a similar brick has a date
plaque for 1702). The central chimney is indicative of a house
from before 1760. The first building in Market Street adjoining
the post office house would appear to have been built soon
afterwards, possibly as a virtually contemporaneous extension
to it.
The house was sold to Joseph
Dodsley Oliver who in the early 1800s was a tanner and wine
and spirits merchant. This led later in the nineteenth century
to more wines and spirits dealers and eventually to the house
becoming the Vaults Hotel, It remained thus until becoming
the post office in 1936. |
