Horse Gutter
Sunday house chat
Last week, after a prompt from my very nosy friend
, I wrote a post about my house. I was cautiously dipping my toes in because I didn’t know if it would be interesting to anyone but me. But yay, it turns out we all love old house stories of a Sunday morning, so here we are again!I loved hearing all the fascinating and intriguing stories about your houses too. So keep them coming.
This week we are talking deeds and old street names.
A few years ago, when Pie was small and tucked up in bed, I suddenly got an itch to look at the deeds for our house. It was late and I should have been in bed, but I think it was the first time since she was born, and since we had moved to this house, that I had the head space, and I had one of those late night bursts of energy.
We used to keep the deeds in this tiny, secret, out of reach cupboard (below, middle). It seemed like a suitably odd and safe place for deeds.
I am about to go off on a cupboard tangent, we’ll come back to the deeds later.
The cupboard where we keep the deeds was built in the 1960’s when the house, which had been built as flats in Victorian times, was made into one big house.
I love this 1960’s addition to the house, it reminds me of my favourite kitchen of all time: the kitchen in ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ by Judith Kerr, which she based on her own kitchen.
So when we came to prepare this room to be our new kitchen we decided to keep the old cupboard and base the whole kitchen design around it.
Our other source of inspiration was this 1960’s larder cupboard that Gerry and I acquired when we first got together. It was in a little back street car repair shop in the village where I grew up. Mr Sams, the garage man, used it to store spanners and tins of oil and stuff and it had a ‘leather-clad-ladies-on-motor-cycles’ calendar pinned to the side. We asked if we could buy it, the cupboard not the calendar (although I wish I’d got the calendar now, just for kitch value!) Mr Sams said we could have the cupboard in exchange for a bottle of wine. Bargain!
It has moved with us everywhere we’ve lived for about 25 years. We love it, but it is actually really impractical. It’s too shallow to hold a modern dinner plate (they were smaller back then, we all ate smaller portions I guess) and the pull down shelf in the middle is too fragile to hold anything heavier than a cereal bowl.
So we decided to use it as inspiration for our new kitchen, but to let it go. It went off to its new home a few weeks back.
What I love about ‘The Tiger Who Came to Tea’ kitchen is the plywood cabinet frame around each door and drawer. After a lot of searching and a few sleepless nights (who knew choosing a kitchen could be so stressful, I thought it would be 100% fun!) we found a local joiner who can copy that style of cabinet for us. He’s made a start, and it is looking amazing! Exactly what we had hoped it would be.
I love the yellow worktop in The Tiger Who came to tea. So, after a lot of playing around with palettes, inspired by an Orla Kiely towel we love and the old blue larder cupboard, we are going for a ‘cafe blue’ Formica worktop.
More about the kitchen design another time, let’s get back to those deeds.
So the deeds go back to when the house was built and what we learned is that back then, our street, which is called a very respectable, and ever so boring name now, used to be called ‘Horse Gutter’. Oh I love that! Horse Gutter. What a deliciously miserable name.
An estate agent showing me a house at the end of our street told me that that house used to be a tannery where they would prepare horse/cow hides to make leather (the stink of ammonia must have been unbearable). So maybe the street got its grim name from that.
But another possibility is this: our street runs down hill from the old main thoroughfare from England to Scotland, so maybe our street was a literal horse gutter, for sweeping horse shit off the main road.
I have no idea, but if I could get the neighbours on board I would be well up for a campaign to reinstate the name!
More about the dream Tiger Who Came to Tea kitchen next week.
I love hearing your house stories, please tell me about your house-history, street name or vintage saucy lady calendars.
Love Helenx
P.S. If you like this post you might like this one by
. My friend Cameron writes about social history inspired by old photos of my neck of the woods.P.P.S. I got a special badge from Substack 🌟
Kitchen units are coming on a treat! It’s going to look so blimmin’ good! We have the same old blue and white kitchen cupboard unit, imherited from my Scottish great aunt’s cottage. My sister’s the current custodian. It’s crazy to think it was a main kitchen workspace. My aunt’s kitchen was minuscule, so the flip down shelf on the cupboard and a tiny Formica-topped table were her only worktops. She still managed to bake pies n all sorts in about 4ft of space!
Your cupboard made my heart skip a beat! I think you’d enjoy our home’s giant old doorbell. It’s huge and still works! I’ll post a pic in chat!
We’ve found some very old ledgers in the attic, a bed frame and a “for sale” sign for when the house originally sold for $19k in the ‘60s.