No 1 The High Street is a large old farm building with adjacent barns and yard. Changes to the outside appearance of the building has seen the Victorian front bay-windows removed and the house returned close to its original construction. The barn to the side of the property has been developed and is now used by the household.
No 6 The Small House, is the location of the Oldham & Co’s bottling plant. It is rumoured that it is called The Small House because it housed the servants from the Manor and it is the smaller of the two properties.
Oldham & Co was a manufacturer of ‘non-intoxicating liquor’. Little is known about the factory now, so if you have any information about it, the please let us know. What we do know is that it sold ginger beer and other such bottled drinks.
The water for the drinks came from a spring at the rear of the property and was piped into the factory. It is thought that the factory closed in about 1935. A plaque on the wall of The Small House reads: ‘B W E 1753’
No 10 or The Swan was the site of an Inn for many years. It was refurbished in the mid 1900s, when it came into the hands of the Charles Wells Brewery. At this point, the top floor was removed and a new roof fitted.
Charles Wells closed The Swan in February 2009, but after a campaign by villagers, it re-opened in December 2009 as a Free House under new management. This did not last and it closed again in November 2010 to be converted to a private house.
No 12 High Street, a row of four one-up, one-down cottages, converted to one property. The entries for three of the four dwellings are on the front, with the access to the fourth property on the right-hand side of the building. The evidence of three front doors in the stone front wall is fairly evident, as they have been filled in with red brick.
Nos 5 to 19 is now a block of low-rise flats, built on the site of a collection of old buildings
The architect has loosely based the design of the new flats on the shape of the original buildings. The block of flats on the High Street were built for the district council at approximately the same time as Leys View, and this whole construction constituted a major development in Sherington at this time, in the mid 1970s.
The small development of six dwellings, Leys View – two semi-detached houses, two detached houses and two bungalows – was built on part of the meadows called The Leys adjacent to Water Lane Farmland, and owned at various times by the Rose and West families. The houses at the far west end of the Estate enjoy views across the rest of the Leys (water meadows) and the Ouse Valley. They have a very pastoral outlook as the meadows have been kept as grazing for sheep, horses and cattle. The two bungalows were built by Cobbold Construction, who then sold on the rest of the land to be developed for four houses.
Within living memory the site was owned by Henry George Rose, who had a woodyard there. He used to convert timber in the round to usable boards by means of a saw-pit. Top dog and under dog. He was also a supplier of locally-made coffins and served most families in Sherington, up until 199?. Charlie West, the last member of the West family to live in Sherington, lived in the small cottage at the entrance to Leys View called Rose Cottage, seen in the photo on the right.
This cottage had been in the West family for several generations along with the land surrounding it. They had used the land as a smallholding with an orchard, chickens and growing vegetables. Also, old Mr West, Charlie’s father, worked for Oldhams mineral water (just a few yards away on the opposite side of the High Street) as a carter delivering bottles of lemonade and ginger beer in the late 1920s and early 1930s, with Charlie as his boy, delivering to places as far away as Bedford, starting at 4.30 am. Some feat by horse and cart. The small brick and tile building in the garden of Rose Cottage has been used at various times as an office for the various businesses, the woodyard and funeral service, and probably known mostly as a booking office for the local bus and coach companies, but that role has also long ago ceased.
When the excavations were being done by Geoff Prince Constructions to lay the services into the Leys estate, several old elm water pipes were dug up, still in a good state of preservation even though they had been in the ground for more than 200 years and had been disused for many, many years. Elm wood has this characteristic of being able to survive without rotting away if kept wet and not exposed to air pollution. These elm water pipes came directly across the High Street, most probably from the spring in what is now the recreation area, where there was also a windmill. The water fed the cluster of cottages that were at the south side of Water Lane, straight across The Leys. The pipes were joined by a spigot and iron clamp method and buried in clay. There is also another water pipe running from a spring in Bancroft Field that still supplies water to Manor Farm cattle, Water Lane Farm and goes on to the rear of properties in the High Street.
The Old Post Office (no 21 High Street) is at the entrance to Leys View, although this shop is technically in the High Street. It is a converted private house that was the Post Office and Store for many years. In its last days as a Post Office it looked just as it has for the last 100 years or so, having had its sign renewed in the late 1990s to resemble the sign as it used to be at the turn of the 19th century. Nothing else had changed.
No 21a High Street was always known as The Corner Stores. This property was mentioned on the 1796 enclosure map and has been many types of business. It was finally closed in 1993 and became a private house.
Archive photographs of the southern end of the High Street
