A ‘Masterplan’ for Atherstone?

Every now and then, when WCC or NWBC gets

some unexpected cash from Government, we get

invited to a consultation. The latest went under the

project name of ‘Atherstone Masterplan’. In the Me-

morial Hall (a possible subject for redevelopment

itself) we met WCC staff and their consultants, At-

kins. They sought our views on what was wrong

Memorial Hall complete with graffiti and banners

with Atherstone and what was required to put it

right. The run-down state of the Market Square, with

its boarded-up properties came first. Then the short-

age of car parking, and concern about the poor stan-

dard of development. All this was logged for inclu-

sion in the Masterplan. We were invited back in Feb-

ruary to see the ‘Grand Design’, expecting to see our

ideas at least sketched out. Instead, the ‘plan’ in-

cluded a ‘water feature’ in the market square, ‘a ten-

pin bowling alley and cinema’ and a ‘multi-storey car

park’ next to the Grade II Station building. None of

these ideas appear to have come from the floor. We

responded as best as we could, without being rude –

‘thumbs-down’ was the most usual response. But

who can say ‘No’ to a proposal for more green

space, more seating, or even pedestrian priority in

the street? In all, it appeared to us to have been a

pointless exercise as there is no money available be-

yond the cost of the consultation; it would be Ather-

stone’s responsibility to raise the cash. The things

we wanted to say were not catered for in the strait-

jacket questionnaire they presented to us (in teams).

More help for historic buildings (like the scheme we

had a few years ago which has so improved Long

Street), a skate park for the young and a solution to

the parking problem were subjects which they could

have tackled but appear to have steered away from.

Today we would probably have added the loss of the

Post Office and the rising number of empty shops.

Forthcoming events

Tuesday, 26 April 2016, 7.30 pm.

AGM and talk by Jeff Morgan, based on his book, ‘The Amazing Astleys’. Trinity Church, Coleshill Road.

Tuesday, 24 May 2016.

A talk and presentation by Eddie Smallwood on recent findings regarding the Battle of Bosworth. Meet at Battlefield Centre, Market Bosworth, at 6.30pm.

Tuesday, 21 June 2016.

Visit to Arbury Hall to include a cream tea. There will be a charge for this event of £12 for members and £15 for non-members. Meet at Arbury Hall at 2 pm.

Thursday, 14 July 2016.

ACS Garden Party, courtesy of Jenny Pitman. There will be a charge for this event of £10 for members and £15 for non-members. Meet at Abbey Farm, Mere-vale Lane, 7 pm.

Tuesday, 16 August 2016.

ACS coach trip to a house and garden. Details and costs to be advised.

Tuesday, 20 September 2016.

Tour of St Editha’s Church, Tamworth. Meet at St Editha’s Church at 2.pm.

EXTRA EVENT: Saturday, 16 July 2016.

Council for British Archaeology West Midlands, AGM and Open Day, Scout Hut, Mill Lane, Man-cetter.

Public exhibition, talks and tour of site, by Dr Mike Hodder, former Birmingham City Council Archaeolo-gist who previously worked on excavations at Mancet-ter. Margaret Hughes will also be giving a short talk for ACS. (more details to be circulated later).

Atherstone Civic Society was formed in 1990

to stimulate interest in, and action for,

the improvement of the local environment.

Hon. Secretary Judy Vero

Grendon Lodge

Long Street

Atherstone CV9 1BA

Tel: 01827 712250

secretary@atherstonecivicsociety.co.uk

Website: www.atherstonecivicsociety.co.uk

‘TOWN AND VILLAGE’

THE NEWSLETTER OF ATHERSTONE CIVIC SOCIETY

No.90 Spring 2016

Battling to Save Atherstone’s Character

It is becoming very difficult to protect Ather-

stone’s heritage. Although 600 houses are

planned on the outskirts of the town, applica-

tions are still coming in for the conversion of his-

toric buildings into small flats. Whilst we had a

conservation officer, all such applications were

professionally assessed for their impact on heri-

tage, and ACS had an easy life. Now we are back

to work with a vengeance. NWBC Planning

Boards have seen battles with officers as council-

lors vote to save our heritage. We support them

in the 3-minute slot for public speaking and the

application generally gets deferred or refused. But

we are dealing with very determined applicants

who will not take ‘No’ for an answer. Currently

we worry about the future of Beech House (below),

Grade II*, and 6 to 8 Church Street, Grade II (all

boarded up). The applicants are claiming that the

repair of Beech

House, which they

have left unoccu-

pied and neglected

for over ten years,

has to be funded

by building on

the last green

space in the Mar-

ket Street area.

This is Bank Gardens, formerly the garden of

Beech House. Before that, in the days when

banks had live-in managers, it was the garden to

Lloyds Bank. Some of you may remember the

garden parties which Alec ( a previous ACS

chair) and Val Chesterton hosted in these lovely

gardens. During the early 2000s we surveyed the

interior of Beech House for the HART project

It was a time warp with early 18th c. oak panel-

ling, door fittings, built-in food cupboard and a

cellar which had also served as a kitchen. These

details had been left untouched by the genera-

tions who had lived in the house since William

Eyre built it in 1709. He died a bankrupt in the

Fleet Prison.

Barge and Bridge temporarily reprieved.

The former Westwood House on Coleshill Road

is likely to be demolished. Owned by Arragon

Properties, it may make way for a block of flats,

which threaten to repeat the mistake of Charles

Wills Court opposite and will also block off

views of the Listed Britannia Works. The refusal

of planning permission last week is not likely to

be the end of the story.

Welcome to our Spring Newsletter.

We are pleased to report that Margaret Hughes

is now back with us and has contributed an arti-

cle on Roman Mancetter. Hopefully we shall

have her back as editor before too long. Judy Vero

Shakespeare and Polesworth

We cannot let the 400th Anniversary of Shake-

speare’s death pass without some recognition of his

importance to Warwickshire; and possibly of his

links to the north of the county. Those of you who

came to Father Philip Wells’ fascinating talk on

Polesworth’s Literary connections will have heard

him mention the intriguing possibility that the young

Shakespeare may have been sent to live as a page at

Polesworth Hall, the home of Sir Henry Goodere.

Goodere was a noted patron of the arts who hosted

a circle of the brightest literary stars at his secluded

home beside the River Anker (where the Abbey Re-

fectory is today). Here William Shakespeare may

have met the poet, John Donne, the playwright, Ben

Jonson, and of course our local poet, Michael Dray-

ton, whom he is said to have regarded as a friend.

Nearby Bramcote Hall (now shamefully in ruins)

was the home of Raphael Holinshed, steward to the

Burdets. He had died in 1580, but his vast Chronicles

of England, Scotland and Ireland, provided the storylines

of Shakespeare’s

history plays.

This theory first

saw the light of day

in 1926 when Ar-

thur Gray, Master

of Jesus College,

Cambridge, pub-

lished a book, A

Chapter in the Early

Life of Shakespeare.

(Reprint available

from Amazon.)

He noted a little-known fact, gleaned from the Min-

utes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-

upon-Avon, 1533-1620, that William’s father, John

Shakespeare, chief alderman of the corporation,

met Henry Goodere in 1570 when Goodere was one

of four arbitrators which the Corporation had

brought in to sort out a dispute. The accounts record

two payments for ‘horse hire to Mr Gooderes.’ At

the time John Shakespeare was in financial difficul-

ties. Could John and Henry have shaken hands on a

deal which gave William to Henry as a bright and

willing page, in exchange for some help with debt?

Just a thought.

A new role for St Mary’s Church?

Like the adjacent Beech House, St Mary’s Church is now

on Historic England’s ‘Buildings at Risk’ register.

This was brought home acutely on St Valentine’s Day

when the Bishop of Coventry, the Right Reverend

Christopher Cocksworth visited. Due to a lack of heat-

ing, winter services are usually held in the lounge at the

rear of the church, but with a large congregation and an

important visitor, it had to be in the nave. So it was

probably the first time the Bishop has processed down

an aisle in his sumptuous purple robes through a mist of

vaporising breath. Thoughtfully, blankets had been dis-

tributed to the elderly and those who were unprepared

for the chill.

It recalls a letter written by a commissioner at the time

of the Dissolution, ‘Atherston, a house of Austin friars,

but so poor that they were not able to pay my costs nor

give me one penny of the accustomed contribution due

to their visitor.’ He left ‘a poor friar to keep mass there’,

and provided sixteen pence per week for his board and

lodging.

Today, we look to the Heritage Lottery Fund to dispense

alms and the Church has passed the first hurdle for a

repair grant. However, the community must also find

£60,000 by November as match funding. If all goes to

plan, St Mary’s will become a community building, capa-

ble of accommodating large public functions, as well as a

place of worship. So this summer the church family will

be fund-raising to make the dream come true. (For more

information see www.stmarysatherstone.co.uk)

Discussion inevitably moved on to The Big Question.

Who is to fund such work? Given that a project of

that dimension probably needs a patchwork of funding

sources, one phrase in particular suggested the most

promising style for the necessary bidding processes: “a

range of exciting, innovative, inter-disciplinary ven-

tures”. This was a recommendation that linked beauti-

fully with the lead question that had opened the meet-

ing: what role in research projects can be taken by vol-

untary organisations (such as ACS and the FOAH)?

For the ACS, Margaret Hughes went along to describe

the Roman Mancetter project, and her account was

followed by Dr Mike Hodder’s very emphatic view

that all the pottery research must be embedded in the

context of the whole Roman Mancetter story. Mike’s

reputation, as former Birmingham City Council Ar-

chaeologist with first-hand knowledge of the Mancet-

ter site, not only

opened the door

to the inclusion of

Boudica theories,

but also implied

“inter-disciplinary

ventures”.

Roman Mortarium (drawn by the late Vivien Swan)

So here we are at the beginning of what could be a

very exciting new phase in Mancetter studies. It is

clearly a long haul, but a good, useful opening oppor-

tunity is offered to us by the Council for British Ar-

chaeology, West Midlands (CBAWM), who were the

prime movers behind this meeting. They have asked

ACS to host their AGM and Open Day in Mancetter

on July 16th (see Forthcoming Events). Margaret Hughes

The Importance of Being Mancetter

It’s there on our Roman Mancetter Trail, described on

the third information board that stands just across the

Anker footbridge below the site of the fort: a land-

scape once filled with Roman industry. That’s the

board that aims to conjure the image of pottery kilns,

from Witherley on its left to the Hartshill ridge over to

the right. At least 65 kilns may have stretched as far as

Weddington, the air filled with their coal-fired smoke.

For more than 200 years this industrial site distributed

its goods widely across the Midlands and the North.

In their time, these Mancetter/Hartshill kilns were of

national importance, in sheer volume of production, in

the extent of their market, in their century-spanning

longevity, and in the value of their chief product - sta-

ples of kitchen craft: mixing/grinding bowls (mortaria).

Now, they are again being recognised as of national

importance, this time as part of our heritage. Their

status has been acknowledged for a good number of

years, certainly since the series of excavations in the

late sixties and early seventies conducted by Kay Hart-

ley, renowned specialist in Romano-British mortaria.

But the acknowledgement has been confined to a rela-

tively small audience, and much of Kay Hartley’s work

(and some of the work of local archaeologists such as

Keith Scott) remains unpublished.

However, a group of present-day experts in Roman

pottery came together recently to consider ways to

promote the historic value of this site, with Kay Hart-

ley’s approval. All were agreed on its significance in

Romano-British history: “a priority for attention”, it

was said. Discussion opened with an overview of the

assets known to exist, which include a startlingly large

number of finds, most of which are in a Warwick Mu-

seum storage facility; a number of other museums

have items on display....Birmingham, Nuneaton and

others. This scattering of actual Mancetter finds is mir-

rored in the scattering of complementary paper-work.

Excavation notes are held in a spread of locations,

many known, many as-yet-unidentified locations

strongly assumed. There may well be something of

interest in more than one local attic! Consequently,

the group agreed that its first task is to complete an

audit of the site’s assets. Once we have that, the pic-

ture will be clearer as to what further exploration could

increase our knowledge of this industry and its era, and

ways can be considered to raise the site’s profile.

‘NO’ to chicken broiler plant at Mancetter. NWBC’s Planning Board, supported by 500 local ob-

jectors have rejected this damaging application which

besides impacting on the health and amenity of resi-

dents would have destroyed an area of the Roman pot-

tery kilns. At the meeting, Cllrs Margaret Bell and

Lorna Dirveiks, gave impassioned speeches, stressing

the tourism opportunities of the internationally recog-

nised pottery kilns and the strong possibility that

Boudica’s last battle was fought in the vicinity.