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| The Old Town Hall |
For my last day out in September 2022, following on from my investigation of All Saints church, listed grave slabs and Commonwealth War Graves in Darton, Barnsley, I returned to Bakewell in Derbyshire for my next British Listed Buildings website Photo Challenge.
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| Listed buildings in Bakewell |
Listed buildings come in all shapes and sizes and, of the 43 that were on my list, nearly half of them are walls, railings, gates, gateposts and steps, which aren’t particularly exciting, but it gave me a reason to explore parts of Bakewell that I hadn’t seen before, when I lived there.
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| Various listed buildings on Matlock Street |
Arriving at Rutland Square on the No. 218 bus from Sheffield, I immediately set off to Matlock Street to find No. 6 and No. 30 on its west side, where most of the converted houses/shops dated from the mid C18 to the mid C19 are included in 6 separate Historic England listings.
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| Nos. 6 and 30 Matlock Street |
None of them possess any great architectural merit and they are all built with sandstone, which I presume was locally quarried from the nearby Ashover Grit - a rock formation that in Darley Dale and the area around Stanton Moor has produced high quality building stone for very many years.
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| Nos. 2-4 Matlock Street and 1/1A King Street |
The early to mid C19 Nos. 2-4 Matlock Street, which is listed together with 1/1A King Street, was for a very long time a popular bookshop but, as with very many other shops in the town, it has changed use and is now one of many cafes in Bakewell.
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| Various listed buildings on King Street |
Turning up King Street, its south side has four Grade II Listed buildings at Nos. 3, 5, 7 and Catcliffe House, which date from the mid C18 to the mid C18 and are all built in Ashover Grit, but it was only No. 7 that needed a photograph, as I had seen the others during my last visit to Bakewell.
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| No. 7 King Street |
On the opposite side of the road, the bow windowed Avenel Court (c.1780) was not on my list to photograph, but it was the first Carboniferous Limestone building that I encountered since arriving in Bakewell, with gritstone quoins and dressings and a stone slate roof.
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| Avenel Court |
Bakewell is set on the junction between the Lower Carboniferous and Upper Carboniferous subperiods, with the former being mainly composed of limestones and the latter comprising the Bowland Shale Formation, which is overlain by alternating gritstone and mudstone.
It is the Monsal Dale Limestone Formation that mainly outcrops in Bakewell and the 1883 Ordnance Survey map shows two quite substantial quarries on the east side of Buxton Road, but I didn’t look at any of the building stones closely.
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| Kings Court |
Adjoining Avenel Court, at Kings Court, is a pair of Grade II Listed gritstone houses with Welsh slate roofs, which probably date to the early C18. Its oculus window and bow window distinguish it from most of the simple houses that I had seen so far.
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| The Old Town Hall |
The building known as either the Old Town Hall (1602) or Buttermarket is a building that interested me during the three years that I lived in Bakewell, but I never went in it and knew nothing about it. The ground floor has gritstone ashlar ground floor piers, quoins and dressings, but the upper floor is built with coursed rubble limestone and it has a stone slate roof.
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| St. John's Hospital and almshouses |
The building originally served as the Town Hall on the upper floor with St. John's Hospital beneath and, after 1709, the almsmen were housed in St John's Hospital almshouses, which was added to the east elevation of the building on South Church Street.
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| An octagonal north end at Brides of Bakewell |
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