Andover History: Memories of Bridge Street

Behind the photographer is the river Anton and the road to the right leads to the Town Mill.

The main building here was called Bridge House, a splendid private residence, built before 1840, with nothing adjacent to it. About 1870, it became the premises of veterinary surgeon Robert Gates and his family who lived there for about 40 years.

Numbering of houses was not common in towns until 1880 when it was ordered that every house had to be numbered for the coming 1881 census. This then became 22 Bridge Street.

The building to the left was the Catherine Wheel coffee house, a temperance-inspired establishment first started in 1879 and originally housed within the premises of the Andover Institute, the building I recently wrote about, standing to the east of the river.

When the council bought that building, financed by Alfred Butterworth, the coffee house had been obliged to move across the street to premises that were built for them in 1900 by Butterworth.

The coffee house was run by a number of shareholders, all keen to promote the cause of temperance and to provide good, cheap meals and accommodation for travellers.

It had essentially been a philanthropic idea that worked for a while but increasing competition from other establishments and arguments over viability meant that most of the shareholders became ‘restless’.

The lease on the new premises ran until 1921, and indeed there was an increase in trade during the First World War when an influx of locally-based servicemen helped matters but the end of the war coincided with a further decline and when the lease ran out, nobody was sorry to give the enterprise up.

In fact, the decision had already been taken away from the coffee house shareholders because, with the death of Robert Gates in 1905, a large holding of property owned by Alfred Butterworth including the vet’s house, the coffee house and Collis’ cycle shop, was purchased outright by the Andover Co-operative Society for £2,500.

However, a stipulation of the sale was that the coffee house be allowed to continue with its lease until it expired.

New premises were erected on the site of Bridge House in 1909, by local builders Beale and Sons whose premises were in Adelaide Road.

The cost of building was over £3,000 but the local co-operative society were thriving at this period and 12 years later when the coffee house became vacant, they decided to demolish their own recent building as well and rebuild a much larger set of premises that took up the entire length of their Bridge Street frontage. This opened in 1923.

In 1968 the Andover Co-operative Society amalgamated with the Portsea Island group, joining a number of other local societies, including Basingstoke, Farnham and Winchester who had already done so.

Regrettably, the new broom chose to demolish the 1923 Andover shop during the 1970s and replace it with an unattractive three-storey block.

By the 1980s, the Portsea Island co-operative realised its non-food retail sales were becoming increasingly unprofitable and the new store was closed in 1986.

Sadly, the huge brick block is still with us, a particularly incongruous backdrop to the new riverside walk beside it.

This is how the same site looks now