50 High Street
History
Another Conder trading token, dated 1852, which I recently purchased. Ling the Draper was located on the High Street, in Osborne House (No. 50).
Hunt & Co.'s Directory of East Norfolk with Part of Suffolk, 1850, on P32 of the section entitled "Towns And Villages in the County of Suffolk" lists under the category of "Linen & Woollen Drapers", a "Ling R. B. & Co.", located on the High Street, although it provides no house number. CREDIT: Stu McCallum
Number 50 started out its life as the Lion Public House and Crown score was once Lion Score, if you were a fisherman and wanted a drink you would have to walk up 48 steps to reach the pub for a pint. The Georgian house which stands here today replaced the earlier building which was destroyed by fire in the mid 16th century.
In 1900 Frank R Wheatley ran a drapery business from No50 and at 100 London Road North he ran a Carpet warehouse. In the 1932 Kelly's Directory Horace Clifford Rudd was listed here as a Fruiterer, by the 1940's it was called North End Fruit Store. In the 1960's the shop become Antiques Decorous carried on into the 1990's, the 2nd picture was taken in 1998 (you can see a little bit of No50, corner of building on the left) now in present day it has been converted into two flats.
CREDIT: Lowestoft High Street, The Butcher, The Baker and The Candlestick Maker by Crispin Hook 2016 Get the book
Architecture
In 1720, the site of Nos. 49A, 50A & 50B High Street is described as being one messuage, divided into two tenements. It was held by Mrs. Mary Stroud, widow of John (mariner) - her husband having died in November 1718. He had acquired the property in September 1710, on forfeiture of a mortgage he had provided for Grace Betts (the tenant of the time) in January 1688. The sum of money lent is not stated in the manorial records.
The building seen today is a later replacement of what was present in 1720, and the abbutalments of the messuage then were given as the plot of No. 49 High Street to the north and Lyons Score (now Crown Score) to the south, with the High Street to the west and land belonging to No. 49 to the east. This shows that, at some stage, the property had either been been created from land formerly belonging to No. 49 or that No. 49 had acquired land belonging to it.
The Manor Roll of 1618 names William Hayward as property-holder, with tenants called Bransby and Davye preceding him - in that order. There is also reference made in the manorial records to Thomas Annot (merchant) as being a former occupant of the messuage. He died in November 1577 and was the founder in 1570 of a free grammar school for forty local boys, who were to be taught "the Rules and Principles of Grammar [English] and the Latin tongue and other Things incident and necessary to the said Art". The original schoolhouse was a building abutting onto the east wall of the parish churchyard - but when this became "decayed", after about 100 years of use, the school moved into the upper room of the Town Chamber which once stood on the site of the present-day Town Hall. CREDIT:David Butcher
We've got an advert here, haven't we? For a shop. So this is the next building down in actual fact. This is 50 High Street. You'd notice as well, unlike most streets, the High Street houses are numbered sequentially so we get 49, 50. We don't get odd numbers on one side and even on the other. So this is Frank Wheatley's. To read his advert, he's 'Old Established and Best General and Fancy Draper in Osborne House' on Lowestoft High Street.
We've got jackets, hosiery, towelling, mantles, millinery (that's hats), calicoes, linings, under clothing, handkerchief, fall nets. I think they could be net curtains. Because we don't know, it's difficult to to say. It's not the biggest of buildings as we shall see in a moment... where all those departments crammed onto the ground floor and Mr Wheatley and his family lived on the top floor? Or did he have a big house somewhere away from here and it was only the staff that lived in. It's a world different to the one that we're familiar with today. We also know he had other drapery stores elsewhere in the town as well. Further south on London Road North and I think there's a possibility that he actually moved from the High Street as the centre of commerce in Lowestoft moved from the ancient High Street into London Road North, he had a very large shop there, certainly in the early 1900s. So he was one of the big businessmen of Lowestoft. It's very, very difficult to, to pinpoint the year of the advert because I tried using the census but I can't find him. The census is every ten years, obviously a lot can change in ten years. But I can find him being a general and fancy draper in a shop almost opposite here in the late 19th century. So it's very, very difficult to pin this down. He's still in the period where people would know what a mantle is!
It's so typical of the... a wonderful fascia there. The windows again are typical Victorian sash windows that slide up and down rather than opening out and of course right at the top we do have a garret there. Today the shop is gone, and in the 1980s it was converted you can see where the shop front has been removed from No.50 and been bricked up. Quite nice front doors put there and the whole property has been converted.
So now we've got 50 and 50a because they subdivided. A friend of mine who was a surveyor, he says he looks upon houses as being more or less and properly organic. They change with the needs of each generation There might be a day, probably won't be anymore, but when this could be converted back into a shop. We know Hayes the ironmonger further up was once a big house.
And it became a shop. The way high streets are going at the moment I think it's on the cards that we'll see more shops close and become converted into apartments and flats CREDIT: Ivan Bunn from transcript - Poetry People - High Street Histories
TM5593NW HIGH STREET 914-1/8/31 (East side) 03/10/77 Nos.49A, 50A AND 50B (Formerly Listed as: HIGH STREET (East side) Nos.50 AND 50A)
GV II
Formerly known as: Nos.51 AND 52 HIGH STREET. Pair of houses, now flats. Late C18. Brick. Roof of black-glazed pantiles. 3 storeys in 4 bays. The ground floor partly re-built late C20. One C20 panelled door right and left, both set within fibreglass late C20 doorcases. Two 2/2 horned sashes between doors, under gauged skewback arches. 4 similar sashes light the upper floors, those to the second storey being shorter. Modillion eaves cornice below hipped roof. One stack on the north and one on the south roof slopes. A 3-storey hipped wing runs east down Crown Score: rendered east front; late C20 fenestration. CREDIT: Historic England
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