44 The Village

A Memory of Powick.

My wife and I moved to Powick in the 1980s. Dating back to the late 1500s the whole row of (now four) houses were used by Cromwell as a hospital during the Civil war. It had no central heating and during our stay there we added that, changed the old drafty windows, put in a damp course including new flooring in the kitchen and lounge, had the roof re-tiled replaced some of the rotten roof beams and timbers and the loft was insulated with a firewall put in place between No44 and No43.

Over its many years, the row had been two, three and finally four houses and sometime in the 1700s the end house No45 (Now the Red Lion) had a fire which also destroyed part of No44 thus the two fronts were changed to brick and the cellar was use to dump the rubble and was eventually filled in with its entrance (at the rear) bricked in and now visible only from the inside of the utility room in N044  as a few years after we left, the Pub owners bought No44 and used it to house their staff (shudder) and added an extension to the rear as a restaurant.

The internal walls were mainly lathe and plaster upstairs and down and the main kitchen beam ran across its length and into next door No 43. The kitchen was large and about 16 x 16 feet. The back of the house was about 3 feet below the pubs car park at the rear, hence the need for a damp course, and at least one original  support beam ran from the roof to below the ground and rested on a large rock as its base.

The upstairs floors were the original long oak planks, slightly warped and original beams ran down the walls in all the rooms. Upstairs had been at some time converted into four rooms with the bathroom the smallest.

We changed all the flimsy doors made from cheap wood, with ledged and braced solid wood and iron latches, fitting a late 18thc lock to the  now new front door.

Shortly in about 1990, illness and circumstance forced us to move and other planned work was abandoned. We bade farewell to No44 and its ghosts ( a few were seen ) with moist eyes.