This glorious old photograph of Winchester Street in high summer, taken by Frederick Pearse around 1905, looks very different from what we would see from the same point today.
All the houses on the right have been demolished and only The Lamb public house in the far distance remains standing.
Likewise, all the buildings on the left have also gone, although the brick pillars in the middle distance mark the former Salvation Army barracks and the adjacent house, both of which still stand today.
The building just beyond the pillars, with the long low roof, is the former smithy. At this period, it was run by George Clayton Mayers who was blacksmith there for 50 years or more until his death in 1922.
From 1830 until the 1850s, it was run by Mary Ann Tasker, the widowed sister-in-law of Robert and William Tasker of the Waterloo Ironworks.
Her blacksmith husband Thomas had died in 1830 and her son Joseph was virtually adopted by Robert Tasker and his wife, who had no children. On his marriage, Joseph was set up as a farmer at Andover Down Farm, but sadly died at the age of 30 in 1854.
For those who have wondered, it is he who is commemorated on one of the twin Tasker plaques inset into the wall outside the United Reformed church.
The building with cast-iron bracket and gas lamp was the grocer and baker’s shop of Wilfred Lawson Ponting.
The painted advertising on the side of the house urges customers to ‘Try Ponting’s Bread’, as well as his ‘lard and sultana pouch cakes’.
Wilfred’s three sons all made their mark in Andover: the eldest was Philip, who was mayor in 1954 and whose motor garage at the bottom of Chantry Street lasted as Pontings of Andover Ltd into the 1980s.
Then there was Lloyd who many will remember as the formidable music master at Andover Grammar School.
As the resident organist at St Mary’s church, he was prominent in the opposition to Revd Peter Chandler’s plan to demolish the church and build a modern ‘worship centre’ in the early 1970s. In one diverting moment during a long saga, the prickly vicar sacked the entire choir.
Finally, there was (Winston) John, the youngest of the three brothers who ran Ponting’s the Chemist and was also mayor in 1951.
As an alderman and chairman of the council’s public health committee, he was one of the main advocates for adding sodium fluoride to the local water supply in 1956; during the subsequent electoral storm that removed many of the pro-fluoride councillors from office, John Ponting was himself ejected by the newly-elected anti-fluoride councillors who elected the aldermen (for the full story, see my book Something in the Water, published by Andover History and Archaeology Society, 2002).
The Lamb in 1905 was run by Henry Hawkins and the cottages on the right-hand side were occupied by a variety of trade and working people of Andover, including a carpenter, a police constable, a laundress, a drainpipe layer and an agricultural labourer.
All in all, there we have the typical assortment of a residential street in Andover.
They and the houses in which they lived are largely now lost to history, but one wonders what interesting stories they all could tell.
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