Smokehouse Raglan Street

The building which is the subject of this piece, and has now been closed for some considerable time, is the premises seen beyond the grey parked car.
 

It stands on Raglan Street, which is named after Fitzroy Somerset, 1st Baron Raglan, overall British commander in the Crimean War - and this places the road’s construction starting-date during the mid-1850s, along with nearby Alma Road and Alma Street, which commemorate a British-French victory over the Russians in September 1854.

Further Crimean associations were once to be found on the Beach Village (al. The Grit) in the form of The Inkerman public house and Inkerman Cottages (both in the Coleman Square area and celebrating a further allied victory in November 1854), while yet another licensed premies called The Balaclava was named in honour of the Light Brigade’s ill-fated charge against the Russian Army’s artillery in October of the same year.

The closed outer doors of the smokehouse premises here conceal an entry-way and preparation-area, beneath the late 19th century, pantiled first-floor extension (which served as a general storage area for materials associated with the curing process), with the smokehouse itself standing beyond them. The structure is of typical local brick-and-flint bond, with cement render on the side and rear elevations, and also roofed with pantiles.

It has a double kill or kell (al. kiln) incorporated within its walls, and each of the spaces measures about twelve feet in length, by eight in width, by twenty in height. Access to both is gained through traditional stable-doors and the floors are made of brick pamments, to allow for expansion caused by the heat of the curing fires (concrete would crack). The inside walls are encrusted with a mixture of carbon and fish-oil, and so are the loves (wooden racks fixed to the walls, from just above head height to roof level), which support the speets (rods) of fish when hung to cure.

Shuttered window-spaces controlled by ropes and set high in the walls, and ridge louvres along the length of the roof, create a through-draught for the fires to smoulder as required and for smoke to exit the building. All kinds of fish were cured in buildings like this one, all over the town, at one time - though they did vary in size and shape: from small backyard ones the size of a shed to the large, rectangular, commercial ones belonging to different companies located along Whapload Road.

Herrings were the main species processed in the form of bloaters, kippers, bucklings and red herrings, with the last-named being Lowestoft’s main speciality from the late medieval period onwards. These were originally ungutted fish, dry-salted in heaps on the ground and turned every so often by wooden roaring shovels so as to be thoroughly exposed to the salt, then washed, drained and hung above slow-burning fires for up to a month to cure - with the fires extinguished every other day and then re-lit the day after, to allow the fish to sweat and not dry out completely. They were exported into Europe, as well as consumed at home, and had an extremely long “shelf-life”.

Coppiced oak or ash rods, known as billets, were produced in their tens of thousands every year in local managed woodlands to supply the materials needed, but a change occurred during the nineteenth century whereby hardwood shavings and sawdust (especially oak) began to replace billets. Probably because of traditional woodland management practice being carried out less and less. And dry-salting also became used less and less in favour of brining in vats of various kinds and sizes, as this was a more convenient way of doing things. Whatever type of fires were employed, though, it was essential to keep them smouldering rather than blazing, and in the larger, company-owned premises “night-smokers”, as they were known, kept an eye on things. The Raglan Street Smokehouse (exclusive of the later extensions and additions to the south and the east) is Grade II listed as a building of historic interest. The Reynolds family, who ran this premises from the early 1930s for about a fifty-year period used to smoke not only herring and other fish, but also bacon and ham for local grocery businesses, with the meat being hung up at the top of the two kilns and left there for as long as was required.