HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURAL SURVEY
11a MARKET PLACE
SUMMARY
Trent & Peak Archaeology was commissioned by Bingham Heritage Trails Association in 2012 to survey No. 11a Market Place, Bingham, a slightly irregular shaped two-storey house. It stands on the south side of where Newgate Street and Market Place meet and its address has in at one time or another been assigned to either street. The building is not listed. It was examined by Nottingham Tree-Ring Dating Laboratory which dated a single cross-beam to between 1718-1743.
The building is brick-built with modern pantiles on its roof. It is composed of two ranges, an earlier west part (which has the dated timber) and an added slightly narrower east part with a basement. Both parts were of two-room plan with a near-central stack. The west part had a street entrance and a possible back entrance, whilst the east part had an east side entrance, next to external steps to the basement. Probably two separate properties to begin with, it was fully used by one family by 1840. The building was much altered at some point after c.1960, with the stacks largely removed and the east part fully re-roofed. New extensions were added at the entrance and at the back. No alterations were made to the basement, which was formerly a bakehouse and whose oven is still intact. Various changes made to this oven point to a lengthy usage.
On a survey of the Chesterfield estate in Bingham made in 1776 the site of 11a Market Place was a plot numbered 359, with the description of ‘bakehouse only,’ leased to Robert Grant. This suggests that the property had two distinct parts at this date.
At the time of the Bingham tithe award of 1840 (with the earliest known detailed map of the town) the site was described as ‘house and bakehouse,’ with Robert Brice holding the freehold. He was listed in a directory of 1832 as a baker and confectioner on Newgate Street, but was not there at the time of the 1851 census, by which time a Thomas Brice (most probably his son) was a baker on Market Street. Not until the 1901 census was a baker again listed on Newgate Street - Arthur Martin, 35, whose surname appears on a shop front on mid-20th century photographs of No. 11a Market Place. In a Kelly directory for 1941 a Mrs. Florence Mary Martin, a likely widow, was listed as a confectioner on Market Place. Use of the oven probably ceased not long after this.
Muller, a leading authority on bakeries, has written that the beehive oven, whose design goes back to Roman times at least, continued in use up to 1830 and was then replaced by the so-called side-flue oven. The Bingham oven bears a strong resemblance to an unreferenced print that Muller reproduces in a book on bakeries that shows a side-flue oven of 1830. Abrupt changes are uncommon and both types are likely to have co-existed in 1830, with the side-flue oven having possibly originated some years earlier during the first quarter of the 19th century. There is the strong possibility that the example at 11a Market Place was constructed between 1828- 32 when Robert Brice first occupied the site. It is likely to be a rare surviving example of one of the earliest side-flue ovens still in situ in Britain, having largely survived intact through its basement location, from not having been in continual and heavy use and from its eventual abandonment rather than replacement.
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