Materials, Fenestration and Chimneys

The normal style of building in Romsey is redbrick, but there are exceptions to this. For example, Linden House in The Hundred and Temple Court House in Church Street are faced with yellow bricks. A variety of brick styles and patterns are found. In some of the pre-nineteenth-century houses, it is not uncommon to see burnt bricks laid to form patterns. There are no examples of grand brickwork, but many houses have small examples of decoration often at the intersection of ground floor and first floor or below the eaves.

Patterns in brick

Right across Romsey, it is common to find the first floors of houses tile hung instead of brick faced. Usually these tiles are plain rectangular, but some are scalloped. There are at least two examples of mathematical tiling in the town, with tiles shaped to look like bricks. These are the NatWest Bank building and 13 Middlebridge Street. In addition, a few houses are clad in slates, one example being in Portersbridge Street.

NatWest Bank. The upper storeys are faced with mathematical tiles.

Detail of Bath House, Middlebridge Street.

A number of houses are rendered and painted as is the Baptist Church. There are two houses that have been rendered and then decorated by the skills of their erstwhile stone mason owners, one in Middlebridge Street and the other in Station Road.

The net effect of this is to give a pleasing diversity of styles particularly in the Market Place and elsewhere in the older streets of the town. The older flats beside Broadwater Road are partly faced with panels, whilst St Anne’s House is faced with pinkish bricks. Modern design is represented by a tall, narrow glass and metal fronted house in Newton Lane, facing the car park.

House fronting Newton Lane car park

Some of the older property in Romsey is timber-framed, although often the timbers are hidden behind later facades. For example the White Horse has a massive timber frame that can be seen within the building, but the front is rendered and gives no hint of the real antiquity of the structure.

Tudor Cottage, adjacent to King John’s House has a box frame, and timber frames are apparent on the old manor house in Palmerston Street and on the jettied building at numbers 19 and 21 Middlebridge Street. Similarly the timber frame of the Tudor Rose public house is evident both without and within.

Timber-framed building, Palmerston Street

King John's House from its garden, with a glimpse of the Abbey Church beyond

Hampshire has no natural stone, so only high-status buildings are constructed with this material in this area. The Abbey church dominates the town’s skyline. It is a unique and outstanding stone building. King John’s House is the stone-built remains of a medieval house that has stood from the thirteenth century. In the nineteenth century, the old vicarage (now Folly House), the adjacent Romsey Abbey primary school and the URC all used stone in their construction.

Flint building in Middlebridge Street

Flint is not a building material traditionally used ino Romsey, but there is one flint building in this part of town, to be found in Middlebridge Street. It was originally built in 1843 as a charity school. The flints are edged with local red brick.

Roofs

There are one or two thatched properties in the town centre, but fire risk caused most thatch to be replaced with clay tiles in previous centuries. The advent of the railway in the mid-nineteenth century meant that slates were economic to buy and many of the Victorian and early twentieth-century buildings had slate roofs. The Abbey church has a lead covered roof. Lloyds TSB Bank and the URC have attractive little turrets that can be seen from many vantage points in the town and which contribute to an interesting skyline.

Roofscape in the Market Place

Tiled roof in the old brewery

Apart from the flat roofs already mentioned, most of the buildings have pitched roofs, those in the Market Place having a variety of pitches and coverings. Among the twentieth century houses, pitched roofs covered with concrete tiles are normal. A few of the older houses have retained their decorative ridge tiles and the house inside the entrance to the old brewery site has a fine roof of decorative tiles.

In The Abbey some houses have been decorated with copper flashing and there is a sundial on one of them. This copper has weathered to green and is very striking. Copper drain pipes etc have been fitted to houses in Spring Place, but too recently for the metal to have acquired a green patina.

Sundial in The Abbey

South Front adjacent to the Bypass

Whereas many of the older houses have retained their chimney stacks, these are primarily functional rather than decorative, although a few are topped with decorated chimney pots.

Windows

Twentieth-century plate glass predominates in the shopping area but some shops have retained much older windows. It is particularly sad when shop owners have removed older windows and replaced them with large panes of glass that they then cover with coloured plastic, thereby destroying the historic ambience of the street scene, but without using the resulting area of glass for the display of goods.

Contrasting windows in the Market Place

There is a range of window styles within central Romsey. Perhaps the most-often remarked upon is that of Alliance Pharmacy with its early-nineteenth century glazing bars and glass. These glazing bars are narrow but deep. Once there were others like them, but they have been replaced with wider and shallower glazing bars. Among these is the Romsey Advertiser building where the Victorian window has been retained.

It is often on the upper floors that the most interesting windows survive. Many of the older houses have vertical sash windows, in the case of shops on the upper floors only. Some of these have simple divisions of the glass, with a single vertical bar in each part of the window. Others have been subdivided into multiple panes, and on some of the second storey windows, the upper window has one row of panes and the lower, two rows.

Three pane sash window

Baptist Church, Bell Street

It is not uncommon to find Yorkshire sash windows on the older houses of the town. These slide sideways and are relatively rare nationally. They are always subdivided into several panes of glass. In the twentieth-century residential houses, windows vary between horizontally opening casement windows and fixed windows with vents above. They may have single panes or be subdivided in the Georgian style. Some of the houses built in the second half of the twentieth century have rectangular or circular bay windows at ground floor level.

Yorkshire sash window at the rear of W. H. Smith

Leaded lights are rarely found except in some of the churches. Coloured or etched glass is similarly rare in Romsey apart from the churches and a little coloured glass in a few Edwardian windows and occasional doors.

Within the town, there are some windows that are of key importance in defining the uniqueness of Romsey. Among these is the bow window which graces the Corn Market at the front of Bradbeers. There are ground floor bays on Berties restaurant in The Hundred and the Three Tuns public house in Middlebridge Street.

Among other individually significant windows are the Victorian arches on the Town Hall. The windows at the front of the Corn Exchange building are important as they act as a focus for the western end of The Hundred. Similarly the façade of Broadwater House acts as a focus for the eastern end of Middlebridge Street.

Doors

Bootscrapers

Despite alterations to the glazing, many of the old shops retain their window frames and adjacent doorways. Often the doors have survived for many years and some of them have appealing decorative detail, either on the woodwork, or in door knockers and letter boxes. In addition, some buildings have retained other old features, such as a previous owner’s initial on the entrance step of a shop, or boot scrapers outside private houses. Detail at entrance to shop in The Hundred

Among the large old houses of the town, some have striking entrances and often quite wide front doors. For example both Park House in Palmerston Street and Linden House in The Hundred have substantial porches.

A selection of door furniture

At the other end of the social scale, a number of houses were constructed in Cherville Street and in Middlebridge Street where two adjoining houses had front doors under one brick arch behind which there was a partition to divide one dwelling from the other. A few of these remain. A number of doorways in the older residential streets lead not to domestic areas but to alleyways that give access to the rear of the premises.

Double doorways are common in Romsey

Within the central streets of the town, there are a number of gaps between houses that provided for horse drawn vehicles to pass to the owners’ stables or yards. Some of these are completely built over, for example number 21 Market Place next to the Romsey Advertiser office. Others have been built over above ground level, such as the Market Place entrance to the White Horse, while others still exist as gated entrances, such as that adjacent to Bradbeers’ carpet shop in Bell Street. The oddest of these is adjacent to Oxfam, which appears to be built over above the ground level, but which only contains a wall with blind windows.

Plaques

The town is decorated with a number of plaques which were placed at different times in the years from 1900. Some provide dates of buildings whilst others contain information about the building.

Plaque on Kent's Almshouses

Plaque on the side of Lloyds TSB Bank