Sawmill Lane

Number 1

We don't know when the house was built.  We know it was there at the time of the 1840 Tithe Survey which shows the house was owned by George Taylor and occupied by Jane Hopkins. 

We do not have any photos of the house.  The one of the right shows what is left of the house.  We are grateful therefore to Ron Holpin who spent his childhood in the house for his recollections of it.

He told us that the front door opened directly into the living room.  There was a back kitchen under a lean-to corrugated iron roof. The rear wall of the house was also the garden of number 21 St John Street, and there was a window in this wall through which Ron remembers his mother chatting a lot to Mrs Staite who lived there.  Attached to the lean-to was a toilet which in Ron's time, had a flush toilet. 

There was a closed-off staircase in the living room which led upstairs.  Under the staircase, the family kept their coal and sat during the Wartime air-raids.  Upstairs, there was a double bedroom and a bedroom over the lean-to.

Apparently the house was very damp and in a very poor condition.  Ron says it was condemned all the time the family were there, but people continued living there for several years after the Holpins moved in 1952.

We do know that when Edmund Cullimore acquired land for the Saw Mill in 1883,  the house which became known as 1 Saw Mill Lane was owned by J. Bevan.  Cullimore however later acquired the house and in 1958 it was put up for sale by his estate.  It was described then as a storeroom which was being let to W.D. Woodman at a rental of 7/6d per week inclusive.  Its rateable value was £8.  It had three rooms on the ground floor with offices over.  It was connected to mains electricity and water was provided from the pipe leading from the railway station.  Click here to read more about the provision of water in Thornbury    

Click here to reads about the OCCUPANTS of the house

This page was last updated: 12/08/2008