Happy days at long-disappeared Shrewsbury town house
One of the casualties of the building of the Shirehall on the eastern edge of Shrewsbury was a grand house called Nearwell.
And after reading our recent feature about the history of the 1960s Shirehall – which is itself now potentially facing demolition – Gareth Williams has sent an evocative reminder of that old and long-disappeared family home.
Gareth is curator and head of learning to the Weston Park Foundation, and is in the final stages of preparing a book about Shropshire's grand houses and halls.
The picture he emailed us of Nearwell is from an old photo album and the original handwritten caption beneath reads: "Nearwell, Miss Mary Lloyd, Miss How, Miss Heaton, and Rachel How (June 1906) and the puppy."
The women, and the puppy, are on a well-tended lawn and in the foreground there are the lines of what looks like a tennis court.
Gareth says of Miss How: "She was presumably the daughter of the banker and solicitor William Wybergh How and sister of the hymn writer and eventual Bishop of Bedford, William Walsham How.
"The house, from internal details that I have seen in other photographs, was probably the work of Edward Haycock the elder. This view also shows giant angle pilasters and smaller pilasters flanking the upper windows – the latter a relatively unusual feature – that are also found at Haycock's Millichope Park."
As for the Shirehall, to make way for which Nearwell was demolished, Gareth says he is surprised that Historic England does not feel that it merits being listed as being of architectural or historic interest, which would give the landmark Shropshire Council offices some protection against demolition.
Excellence
"As John Newman considered in his 2006 revision of Pevsner, it's one of the few exceptional 20th century buildings in Shrewsbury," said Gareth.
"It's also representative of the excellence of the architects that county councils used to have in-house.
"We're also lucky in having Chant's former Shrewsbury Technical College/ Wakeman/ Shrewsbury College and Bunker's Shrewsbury Police Station. They are not to everyone's tastes but it all adds to the architectural variety of the urban space and, in the case of the Shirehall, it matches the grand scale of Lord Hill's Column."
In living memory Nearwell was not used as a residence, but as a hostel for young male students from across the county studying at Shrewsbury Technical College.
According to information on the internet, Nearwell was one-time home of Bishop Walsham How, and was run by a Mr and Mrs Spurr, and then from 1951 to 1956 by John and Eileen Jones, with Mr Jones teaching at the technical college.
Among those who followed were a Mr and Mrs Sadler, and a Mr and Mrs Yeomans. Mr Yeomans taught technical drawing at the college.
There followed Mr and Mrs Eddie Nicholls, who went on holiday to Scotland in (it is said) August 1963 and returned to find that Nearwell had been demolished while they were away, although all their belongings were safely stored. After demolition the hostel moved to Sutton Lodge in Betton Street, and was closed in 1966.
