In last week’s Rye News there was a request for our readers to send in photographs of what they can be see from their windows at home. The article below tells you about the view from my window and the story attached to the building I look out onto.
Rye is famed for its buildings of all shapes, sizes, age and description, and many are Grade 2 listed, defined as “being of special architectural or historic interest” and stand a very good chance of being preserved in perpetuity.
One such building is in Tower Street (the building between 16 and 17 to be precise) which we would recognise as Webbes Fish Café. However the main photograph (above) shows a different view, the rear of the building as viewed from my bedroom window in Rope Walk.
This Arts and Crafts building was built in 1907, designed by architect Philip Henry Tree for Wright and Pankhurst as a fireproof repository and store. Wright and Pankhurst were described as a motor-car proprietor from 1911, but their horse drawn taxi service continued until the 1930s.
The building is built over four floors with one of the first concrete staircases, in distinctive red brick, reminiscent of the factory building featured in the Wallis and Gromit films, particularly the film “A close shave”. The building has a date stone of 1907 with the initials W and P (for Wright and Pankhurst) with a carving of a galleon and a dolphin.
At the time it was developed the building was described in an advertising brochure as “the only absolutely fireproof building of its kind in England – each floor heated by the most up to date scientific hot air apparatus and served by a gas powered lift to reduce the risk of handling”.
In later years it became Dean’s Rag Book factory which also made soft toys and was a big employer of local ladies. The other big employer of women was the Hadfield’s Rye Model Laundry which was approximately where the River Haven Hotel now stands. At some point, when it was no longer Dean’s, tragedy struck, some teenagers had a party up there and it’s understood a candle was knocked over and the subsequent fire claimed the lives of two of the party goers.
The building was later acquired by local antiques dealer Ann Lingard for many years before she relocated to what is now Andy McConnell’s glass shop “Antiques and High Class Junk” in Rope Walk. It was vacant before an application for change of use was approved in 2003 from a storage warehouse to a restaurant with function room and cafe bar which we all now know as Webbes Fish Cafe.
At the time the application for change of use was approved, the original wooden fire escape was replaced with a metal one which reached all four floors and in the same year, 2003, the property was listed Grade Two.
So this is an interesting history of a building being recycled and a view of the rear many may not have seen before. When looking at it I often think that it’s an ugly building but at the same time fascinating and unique to Rye and I imagine how many red bricks it took to build it. Counting them would be a very time consuming exercise and could take days, mind you, no time like the present so here we go. One, two, three, four, five …
Image Credits: Nick Forman .