Stories of the Street - Sixteen

Chris and Mary have lived in the flat for almost two years. They are both teachers and are enjoying an increasingly good life together.

He looks out of the window and watches the sun cutting sharp shadows across the low roof on the other side of the street.

“I’ll take those photos before going in, this morning, love.” He calls to Mary, who has her head buried deep in the wardrobe, searching for something.

“OK!” Her mumbled voice replies, “I’ll go in by bus and you take the car.”

“Thanks.” He replies absently.

He watches the dreaded pigeons as they flutter across the street on to the roof and the top of the shop fronts below. Those birds have been a constant irritant to him. He shakes himself from thoughts of wire and poison, re-focussing on the task he aims to complete before going to school.

Chris is a geography teacher and has a comprehensive knowledge of the area they live in. He knows the age and pedigree of every building in their street and has been compiling a mini history of the place for some time.

They live in one of the art deco flats built in the late twenties and have been very pleased with most of what they got when they moved in. So many original features survived and the exterior is pretty good, too. But the pigeons have proven themselves to be a real nuisance.

Still, that is not his concern, today.

For the last week he has been bubbling with excitement about his biggest discovery. While mapping out the development of the street, he thought he had known virtually all there was to know about the two farms and the road dividing them, which formed two thirds of the original street. He knows all about the families who owned and worked the farms and how they sold up to the man who divided the land into plots and developed the place. The street did have some buildings dating back possibly to the medieval period and the church around the corner, now St Andrews Anglican parish church, is a Victorian pile built on the site of a Saxon chapel. History, in Chris’ mind, oozes from every bit of ground around him and he has walked up and down the whole site, measuring, estimating, and drawing. He has tried to fill in every last detail of the place and thought he had sorted everything out in his mind.

Until last Tuesday evening, that is.

On Tuesday, Chris and Mary walked down the back alley behind the street measuring the width of the rear of each plot. A hundred or so yards before their own Deco building, Chris stopped and began to stare at an out-house behind number fifty three; the old hairdressers, now about to become a video rental shop. Workers had removed a wooden lean-to, which had been obscuring the outhouse and they were clearing the ground in preparation for a much larger rear extension.

What Chris had discovered was the skeletal remains of a medieval hall of the sort he had studied, taught about and visited. The wooden framework, cleared of much of its outer skin, modern brick in-fill and so on looked in fantastically good condition. He estimated with awe that those oak beams and posts last saw daylight about five hundred years ago.

Looking at his maps and notes it became obvious to him that the building was not only correct in all of its visual details but was in a location that made good sense. It had a history. It was a major find. It was fantastic.

Unfortunately, they had to go out to visit Mary’s parents and did not have time to study the place further and Wednesday had been a complete wash out with work consuming every minute of the day, so today, he was going to take a number of photos of the building and do two things. One, he would contact the local Authorities and tell them that they needed to stop the work on the place and call in the archaeologists. At the same time, he was going to email the photos to one of his old university lecturers. A phone call last night had secured the old duffer’s agreement to show the pictures to a colleague with expertise in medieval architecture. If his suspicions were confirmed his next stop would be the local press.

But first, he needed to get the photos.