Warminster Museum: East Street

IT is possible that you have never given a lot of thought to East Street. It is, after all, just a busy street bringing lots of traffic to town and taking lots of traffic away from town.  But is that all it is?

Most certainly, it is not all that it was. Until the early 1800s, there were two mansion houses in East Street.  One of these was the home of the wealthy Halliday family. The Hallidays owned quite a large area on the north side of East Street, and their mansion house home was in the area that is now Buttons Yard. They left this house sometime after 1801 and moved to one of their other properties, Yard House, a little way further West. Yard House is still there, but the original mansion house was demolished, and it does not appear on the next map dated 1836.

The second mansion house was East End House, and it appears on the 1886 OS map. It was a very grand affair, sitting in extensive grounds. The entrance to this property is shown on the map as “gate”. The gate no longer exists, but the drive entrance is still there.  It is the opening on the left of the filling station. East End Avenue cuts right through the site of the house and it is possible that householders on this section of East End Avenue will find bits of East End House in their gardens.

East Street was still the place to live, well into the 1780s, and John Lambe built a very fine home for himself. It was completed in 1789. Anatomy Clinic now occupies both the left and the right of the ground floor this house, but if you stand back to view the building you will realise that the centre rooms and perhaps the original entrance hall on the ground floor are missing.   

The good times for Warminster came to an end in the first half of the 1800s and someone felt that better use could be made of a fine garden behind a house that no-one could now easily afford. The centre of the ground floor was opened up to allow free access to a large workshop that was built in the garden. The 1884 map shows this workshop to be a carriage works.  During the First World War, this works was converted into the Empire Cinema, so Warminster had two cinemas for a time. The Empire also put on variety shows and it was a popular place for the many soldiers stationed in the area. You could say that the troops were also well served for liquid refreshment, with four substantial pubs in this street.

It is easy to miss signs of the early high standard of some of the buildings in East Street.  One example is TJ’s barber shop. The front wall that you see from the street tells a story that is difficult to fathom. The shop window is not original and the window on the first floor is also a later alteration, but the brick work at the level of the first floor is the work of a highly skilled bricklayer and he was laying bricks for a wealthy client. He was working sometime in the early 1700s, perhaps even a little earlier than that.

Above this impressive first floor, the style of the brick work changes and it would appear that the top storey of this house was being built against the wall of the building to the right. In the high standard brickwork of the first floor, each brick course finishes properly, but this does not apply on the right side of the upper floor. Oh, and the left side has puzzling features, too.

If you can put up with the noisy traffic, a gentle walk along East Street can be very interesting. East Street goes back a long way in time. If the old-timers could have foreseen conditions in the 21st century, they would have built a wider street.

Above: 1886 map of East Streeta