HISTORICAL ARCHITECTURAL SURVEY
19 MARKET PLACE
SUMMARY
Trent & Peak Archaeology was commissioned by Bingham Heritage Trails Association in 2012 to survey No. 19 Market Place, a three-storey building on the north side of Market Place in the centre of Bingham. Although not listed, the building gives the outward appearance of dating from somewhere between the mid-17th century to the mid-18th century. This survey report is produced in association with a separate dendrochronolgical report by Nottingham Tree-Ring Dating Laboratory.
The building is brick-built with tiles on one side of the gabled roof and slates on the other. The building is two rooms long (8.2m x 4.6m), separated by an internal brick wall, with is projecting stair-turret to the rear. The latter had paired doorways to the two rooms on each floor level; only those on the uppermost floor remain intact. A two-storey addition with a catslide roof occupies the north-east corner and a later single-story addition is set back in the north-west corner. There is a single cellar under the west part of the building. Although the building retains many plank doors, there are very few dateable fittings and no original fireplaces showing in the building.
The building was used as a home with lodgings and possibly a workshop throughout most of the 18th and 19th centuries. The shop to its east side was probably added towards the end of the 19th century. It seems to have been a base for painters and decorators for nearly a century, in particular being used by generations of the Gray family. It may have started out as the home and workshop of the grave stone carver Thomas Wood. Today it is business premises with lodgings on the top floor.
The house was most likely a simple two-unit house without a passage but with end stacks, a plan type that existed from c.1620 up to 1800 (a classification based on Brunskill 1997). Many of these were built with outshots (featuring the catslide roof), but in this instance the building had a stair-turret from the outset and the outshot was added later. The latter’s brickwork is very similar, is coursed in at the joins and this suggests that it was erected not that long after the initial build.
Although the turret gable appears to have been rebuilt, the rest of the building is composed of 21/4 inch (57mm) thick and 9-91/4 ins (229-235mm) long bricks, set on the street frontage in Flemish bond coursing. The street frontage has partial symmetry, with windows set at equal distances from a slightly off-centre doorway, and positioned in the same positions on all three floor levels. The windows are mainly tripartite with a central casement and have frames that are set flush to the outer wall.
The building plan the brickwork evidence (brick sizes and coursing) and lack of strict Georgian-style symmetry on the building’s front suggest a probable mid to late 17th century date, more likely the latter. However, dates from the dendrochronolgical survey fail to support this. These include a date of between 1603-28 for a purlin in the main roof and a date of 1635-40 for a purlin in the roof over the outshot, surprisingly early dates. However, another main roof purlin and, more significantly, a ceiling beam have produced much later dates of 1757-82. Whilst brickwork evidence in itself can be unreliable for dating a building, other factors taken together place the building somewhere between these extremes. However, this late date may yet prove to be correct; further tree-ring sampling might be considered to help resolve the issue.
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