St Peter's Street

The cottage forms part of a terrace of three identical houses (1, 2, and 3 St Peter’s Street) built in 1905 by COURAGE & CO, the London-based brewery that owned The Bunch of Grapes public house at the time.

The cottage walls are of brickwork in Flemish bond with blue headers, blind arches with stone keys, containing bands of brick and tile. The tiled roofs of the three cottages are stepped to the slope of St Peter’s Street, each unit identical and consisting of two storeys with one upstairs window under the eaves with their interesting detail of black wrought iron eaves brackets. The doorway has a side window contained within the arch (giving it an asymmetrical look), and a stable door (giving it a somewhat rural look). The three cottages are listed (under English Heritage’s Statutory List of Buildings of Special Architectural or Historic Interest) as “unaltered examples of the Arts and Crafts style as applied to artisan dwellings in a confined central site”.

The Arts and Crafts Movement

The Arts and Crafts movement, founded by John Ruskin and William Morris, spanned a period of around 50 years in the nineteenth century and spread across much of the UK, reaching its height in the late Victorian and Edwardian era. The look is all about simple, traditional building forms, using natural, vernacular materials and is a celebration of craftsmanship and individuality. The favourite word of the architects who built them was ‘honest’. This meant straightforward and solid construction. Materials were not hauled from factories on the other side of the country but were found as near to the site as possible. Given the brickworks in Bishops Waltham, it is tempting to suggest that these three brick cottages were indeed made from local materials.