South Street

A short stretch of South Street is one of the most pleasant parts of the town because the footpath runs alongside the river that we know as the Bourne Eau. The iron palisade fence that can be seen running between the river and the street was erected in 1869 at the expense of the parish and is still in a sound condition.

Dozens of mallard can be found here most days and often there are children feeding them with morsels of bread that bring them flapping and quacking along the water ready to snap up what is on offer. Unfortunately this scene is not always as pleasant as it looks because there are those who use this waterway as a dumping ground for their rubbish and fast food cartons and empty cans can often be found floating on the surface while cars, vans and lorries jam the road into town and the fumes at rush hour are overpowering and unhealthy. We therefore need two things to make this an idyllic place to be: a more disciplined approach to litter louts and a by-pass that would relieve this road of its daily traffic congestion. 

A mix of old properties can be found in South Street, most of them modernised or turned into shops and business premises. The red brick building at No 1 is from the early 19th century and was once a town house with a coaching arch leading to the stables at the rear but is used today as a fast food outlet. 

Brook Lodge was built as the vicarage for Bourne in 1776 by the Rev Humphrey Hyde who was Vicar of Bourne from 1763 until 1807, and stands at the end of Church Walk but the frontage is on a bend in South Road. It was replaced by a new vicarage in 1879 and has since been used as a doctor's surgery but is now converted into flats. The exterior has been rendered and whitewashed and the entire building and surrounds have a dilapidated air and the house has therefore lost much of its grandeur from past times. South Lodge further along however has retained its original 19th century appearance of red brick with ashlar quoins and a blue slate roof and therefore remains a substantial and attractive house.

Most of the old cottages and houses in the town centre have been turned into shops or  fast food outlets such as here in South Street.

The quaint house in South Street on the opposite side of the turning into the public library was built as the gatehouse to the Red Hall in the early part of the 17th century. This cubic building with lancet windows was originally finished in the same distinctive hand-made red bricks that were produced locally but the outside walls have been rendered and painted and turrets which adorned each of the four corners of the roof were removed during the early part of the 20th century.

Wherry's grain warehouse	No 1 South Street, now a fast food outlet
South Lodge	The Red Hall gate house

South Street is also the home of Bourne's most inglorious building, the public lavatories. They were erected by the former Bourne Urban District Council during the last century and because of continued neglect, they have become dark, dirty and vandalised and often without even running water in some of the more important facilities. It is also a forbidding place to visit after dark. The problem is currently being address by South Kesteven District Council, the local authority responsible for such matters.

The council has agreed to provide new lavatories, either by refurbishing the existing ones or by replacing them with a new 36-foot toilet block to be built at the entrance to the market square behind the town hall at a cost of £100,000. Bourne Town Council were not consulted but a survey among local people showed that the majority want new toilets on the South Street site and not on the market place.

The market traders do not welcome them there either because they will reduce the space available for stalls and could even deter shoppers. The lavatories were eventually closed in October 2002 on the pretext that they were being vandalised and had become a haunt of paedophiles but there was such as public outcry at the loss of the amenity that the building was refurbished at a cost of £4,400 and re-opened in April 2004 while plans for the new toilets appear to be in abeyance.

South Street is part of the A15 trunk road and those who drive into Bourne from the south see a pleasant aspect of the town, the Tudor almshouses with the Abbey Church behind and between them the entrance to Church Walk which is the perfect place for a leisurely stroll on a warm summer's evening. The trunk road follows the footpaths and cart tracks of yesteryear. It has been widened in places, the surfaces repeatedly reinforced and some sections rebuilt but there has never been a concerted effort to replace it with a new and straighter carriageway to connect north with south. The difficulties we experience today were anticipated a century ago yet none of our local authorities have addressed the problem of building a new road that would bypass this town and those other communities along the route in the locality that have suffered since the arrival of the motor car. The sharp bend pictured above, showing an 18th century cottage on the left and Brook Lodge on the right, is one of two that create perilous conditions at this point, where traffic queues build up day after day, causing a constant hazard for both drivers and pedestrians, yet relief for this dangerous stretch of road is not even on the agenda of our county highways authority.
 

UPDATED MARCH 2005

See also South Street in Past Times     South Street - then and now

Roads and traffic

For more information about Wherry's warehouse see The corn trade

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