History column: Earliest published view of Andover

In the days before photography, illustrations for published books began with a drawing, which was then copied as an engraving onto a copper plate.

The engraved plate was then inked and a flat sheet of paper laid down upon it to create a print.

Repeatedly, paper sheets were applied until finally the lines of the copper became too worn to be effective. If more prints were required a new copper plate had to be engraved.

This particular example of the art comes from Robert Mudie’s Hampshire: Its Past and Present Condition and Future Prospects, published in 1838 in three volumes, the second of which includes Andover.

READ MORE: David Borrett's column: Corner of Andover High Street 

The same volume contains a view of old St Mary’s church, just a few years before its demolition.

Unfortunately, about 50 or 60 years ago, it became the fashion to break up antique volumes such as these, in order to hand-colour and then sell the topographical prints, either with card mounts or put into reproduction plain black (Hogarth) frames.

It was a commercially attractive process, as the collective value of the prints was far greater than that of the individual books.

Now, however, in a reversal of that earlier trend, these prints flood the market because house furnishers prefer plain walls and sadly, the original books, complete with their prints, have largely gone forever.

I noticed the other day that there was an original set of Mudie’s Hampshire (as it is generally known) for sale at £900, though, for the non-purist, print-on-demand volumes are available from a publisher in India.

Away from all that, what do we see of local interest in this engraving?

Evidently, the artist, G S Shepherd, who took some trouble to delineate individual buildings, was a little way along the Ladies Walk - first laid out in 1785 - along the higher ground to the south of the town.

Probably he was standing at the crest of the walk, not far from the top of today’s Old Winton Road.

That road was not laid out for houses until after 1900 but it did exist much earlier and had long been the site of a brickworks and a chalk pit.

SEE ALSO: Story of Caldecott House and the life of a corn merchant

Artistic licence has excluded this from the scene but apart from that, the artist has tried to represent the town as he saw it.

Among the larger buildings, we can see old St Mary’s, centrally placed, in the far distance.

Interesting too, is the building with a clock tower - not the present Guildhall built in 1825 but the earlier one that was built on the same site in 1724, which dates the original drawing to at least 13 years before the 1838 publication date.

All the corn fields in the foreground extending down to the buildings were part of the centuries-old Woolvers Dean farm (spellings vary) that was sold off in 1872.

The line that runs along the entire width of the picture just in front of the first buildings might easily be confused as a main road but it is not London Street, just another field.

There is a line of trees to both its long edges. London Street, even in the early 19th century, would be lined with buildings.

Because of the road-like field, it has been suggested in the past that the prominent building to the right could be the old silk mill (which was north of the road) but I think it must be Wolverdene House.

An older building was knocked down not long before 1820 and replaced with what we see today.

The three-section frontage does largely match and that new building would surely have been included in the original drawing, as it was the nearest to the artist and there would have been no other structures nearby, except barns.

Can we see the silk mill? It was actually two mills set at right angles to each other, according to the tithe survey map of 1848-51, and perhaps these are indeed the two buildings with billowing smoke from the chimneys.

Photography later simplified the process of capturing an exact, topographical image but before that more uncompromising development, it is quite likely that the artist would, to some extent, add, move and omit buildings and other details to suit the aesthetics of his composition.

With that in mind, tempting though it is, we should not rely too much on the complete accuracy of the scene.