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The Queen’s Head, The Three Gables

1-3 St Margaret’s Street , Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire

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The Queen’s Head public house occupied the right two of the three 17th century gabled houses at the junction of St Margaret’s Street and Bridge Street. The left (1 St Margaret’s Street) was the eating house of Mrs Jane Deadman and her daughter, also Jane, in 1861, becoming a tea and coffee shop that was run by Mrs Matilda Barnett. The photograph shows the buildings in about 1900 with a wooden fascia across the ground floor of the pub (numbers 2 and 3), with lettering advertising G. & T. Spencer’s beers. It has horizontally-opening sash windows on the upper floor and all the stonework is lime-washed. Adjoining on the right is a bigger later 3-storey building, also lime-washed.

A slightly later view taken from the end of the bridge. Notices have been posted on both the pub and the tea shop that probably advertise the buildings for sale, so the date would be after 1914, when the pub closed following the bankruptcy of the Spencer Brewery, who had purchased it in 1897. The X marks the mother of Henry Crisp, the ironfounder whose family had run the pub at an earlier time.

Following the bankruptcy of the Spencer brewery, the Queen’s Head was sold off, the fascia was removed, as was most of the lime-wash (traces remain, as on many Bradford buildings). A more drastic change was the replacement of all the windows with ‘restored’ 17th century-style mullioned windows under mouldings. The other big change is that the tall building to the right, lately occupied by Perkins & Keates bicycles, was demolished; its site is now the Millennium Garden. The right hand gabled part can now be seen to have been an addition, as it has a straight joint on its left and slightly different stonework. The sagging roof was rebuilt in 1956 by H.S. Bowyer & Son for owner A.C. Scrine and involved 12 tons of stone tiles.