11, Bridgeland Street

This is a large house on Bridgeland Street, Bideford, dating to approximately 1792. It has been converted into a shop. The house is constructed of solid rendered walls with a slate roof, the front range being hipped with a central valley. Although no external chimneys are visible, they are contained within the thick walls between the front and back rooms. The original plan comprised three rooms wide and two rooms deep, with a staircase replacing the rear middle room. Front rooms were accessed from the stair through a small lobby, and the house has a two-storey rear wing to the right.

The front of the house has been remodelled with a three-window range; the outer windows on the upper floors have three lights each. The ground floor now features late 20th-century display windows set within older, moulded surrounds and a moulded cornice. The upper floors have box-framed sash windows with horns. A modillioned eaves-cornice is present, although its upper section appears to have been altered. An old photograph from before 1869 shows the front of the house with three-storey canted bay windows. The rear wall of the main range, visible from Rope Walk, includes barred sash windows and a tall, round-arched stair window with small panes.

The interior of the main range’s ground floor has had all partitions removed, except for the wooden open-well staircase, which rises to the third floor. This staircase features cut strings with shaped step-ends and moulded nosings, slender turned balusters (two per tread) with square necking pieces, and a moulded handrail ramped over plain-shafted column-newels. Decorative scrolled balustrades are present at the foot of the first flight. A half-handrail with half-newels (but no balusters) runs along the outer walls of the flights to the second floor. Second-storey rooms have six-panelled doors with raised moulding and two-fillet ovolo-moulded frames. The left-hand front room retains an original pink and grey marble chimneypiece with triple flanking shafts supporting an entablature. The entablature features a white marble plaque carved with a bunch of grapes, a plain cornice shelf, and a cast-iron grate with surround and a hearth of black-and-white patterned tiles (likely from the late 19th century). The right-hand front room has an original wood chimneypiece with a moulded architrave and dentilled cornice. Similar chimneypieces are found in the rear third-storey rooms, although without the dentils. All three chimneypieces contain cast-iron grates. Third-storey rooms have two-panelled doors. The rear wing was not inspected.

The house was built to replace the eastern end of a larger house constructed in 1693, the remainder of which now forms No. 12 Bridgeland Street. The larger house was leased in 1784 to John Kimber, who converted it into two dwellings. In 1792, No. 11 was described as ‘the new dwelling house lately built by the said John Kimber now in the possession of Abraham Whiteacre Esquire.’