Pelham Terrace Including Rear Yard Wall

Pelham Terrace, Grimsby

Pelham Terrace is a terrace of five houses built in 1854 for Charles Anderson Pelham, the second Earl of Yarborough, a major local landowner and director of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway Company, which was responsible for early development of Grimsby Docks. The terrace has undergone later nineteenth-century and twentieth-century alterations to No.12, and minor alterations to the remainder.

The terrace is constructed of red brick in Flemish bond with a Welsh slate roof. It comprises three storeys with a three-window range to each house, arranged in handed pairs. Each house is set on an ashlar plinth with three stone steps leading to a recessed half-glazed panelled door with engraved panes and a plain fanlight beneath a round arch with impost blocks. The ground-floor windows are 6/6 sashes with stone sills beneath cambered rubbed-brick arches.

A first-floor balcony is carried on chamfered timber piers with shaped arched braces featuring pierced trefoils. The balcony has a wooden fascia with corniced wooden gutter, a balustrade with wooden principals and handrail, and ornate cast-iron scrollwork panels bearing anthemion motifs, alternating with plain bars. The first floor contains French windows with glazing bars beneath two-pane overlights. The second floor has 3/6 sash windows with sills. A moulded eaves board with carved modillion brackets carries the wooden gutter. Three large corniced roof stacks are present.

Individual variations exist across the terrace. The entrance to No.4 has a painted overlight with a Highland landscape scene. No.6 has plain glass to its door. No.8 features plate glass to the lower half of its sashes and horizontal sliding Venetian blinds to the first floor. No.10 has ribbed glass to its front door, shaped blind boxes to first-floor windows, and a plain wooden balcony balustrade. No.12 has undergone more extensive late nineteenth-century alterations, including a projecting ground-floor extension with 2/2 sashes to the front and an entrance with an inserted twentieth-century glazed door and fanlight in an original quoined ashlar surround, now partially mutilated by the adjoining later twentieth-century building. The first floor of No.12 has a plain balcony, original French window, two twentieth-century glazed windows, and a twentieth-century concrete-tiled canopy. The right return of the terrace bears scars from an end house demolished in the 1970s.

The rear of the terrace contains a variety of fenestration, including wooden ground-floor bay windows and sashes with glazing bars. Low two-storey rear service wings are present, and No.4 has a tall late nineteenth-century single-storey music room (now garage) with round-headed stained glass windows. Original board doors and inserted twentieth-century garage doors open onto rear yards enclosed by coped walls ramped up to higher sections adjoining the outbuildings.

The interior contains cantilevered staircases with slender column-on-bulb balusters, wreathed and swept grip handrails, and moulded tread-ends. Four-panelled doors and windows sit within architraves, with moulded plaster cornices throughout. The late nineteenth-century music room to the rear of No.4, now a garage, retains ornate interior features including a panelled dado and wall arcade of fluted Corinthian pilasters with half-columns flanking the former stage (now utility room). An elaborate modillioned cornice, partially mutilated by late twentieth-century roof work, is accompanied by round-headed windows with stained glass floral designs in fluted architraves. A door to the yard has an internal hardwood surround with twin columns; a twentieth-century garage door has been inserted to the rear.

Pelham Terrace forms a group with the slightly earlier St James's Terrace nearby on Bargate.