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 This is a one place study looking at one house-Spring Hill, Broad Green, Wellingborough, Northamptonshire. Covering the years c1830-1945 it will look at how the house and its use changed over the years and at the lives of the people who lived there. It will also look at changes in the area of Broad Green over the same time period.

 

Spring Hill, was the large Victorian house which stood on the land where the development of flats and maisonettes in which I live along now stand. I do not know exactly when it was built or by whom but it does not appear of a map of the area in 1803 or on Bryant's map of Northamptonshire in 1824.

 

It is first mentioned in newspaper reports in 1846 when it is referred to as "Spring Hill Cottage". So it was probably built in the 1830/40s.  I am not sure that "cottage" is the right description when Spring Hill Cottage Wellingborough is described in a sale advert in the Northampton Mercury of 15 January 1853 as having 

" a good carriage drive in front, a garden, shrubberies and paddock with about two 

   acres at the back the whole enclosed in ring fence with a wall seven feet high. 

   The house contains large dining room, parlour, breakfast room, kitchen and five 

   bedrooms, with back kitchen, laundry over it and convenient out houses. The 

   stable yard contains two coach houses, stabling for three horses and convenient 

   sheds. In the paddock there is a shed for three cows, calf pens and piggeries 

   with gates to back street"

 

It was a private home for much of its existence but during WWII it was a convalescent home for soldiers of the Free French Army run by French military nurse Mrs Jeanne Mitchell and was visited by both Charles de Gaulle and the Duchess of Gloucester. 

 

After the war it became the British Rail Sports And Social Club for several decades being extended and altered by the club many times before falling into disrepair and finally being demolished in 2014.

 

I want to find out as much as I can about the various residents of Spring Hill especially the Mitchell family who are commemorated in the name of part of the development which replaced it.

 

I will use census returns, newspaper articles and parish registers among other resources to build a picture of the people who lived in Spring Hill and their lives.

If you have any interest in Spring Hill please get in touch