Herbert’s Yard
The slum houses
As cottages were being built to the south, on Hamilton Place, developments were taking place behind the main street frontages of Crook Street to the west and Princess Street to the north. What had formerly been the waste and open lands were colonised with the construction of the so-called courts. They consisted of cheaply built rented accommodation arranged around small yards with few, if any, facilities such as piped water or waste disposal. The southern wing of one such development, Herbert’s Yard, occupied the northern part of the excavation site. Like the terraced cottages, it is first attested in the 1861 census and was presumably built around the same time as the cottages.
The courtyard houses were built from brick, with slate roofs. The western end of the courtyard incorporated part of an earlier building, dating from the later seventeenth century. Each house had a door on the north side and one window on each of the ground and first floors, facing the courtyard, while there were no windows at all to the south. There was no back yard provision, in true back-to-back fashion, although most local authorities had discouraged this system of construction after 1850.
The ground floors were not subdivided and consisted of a single room, a form known as ‘single pile’. There was considerable variation in size. Number 6, as excavated, was only 1.4 m × 4.1 m internally (a ground floor area of 5.74 m2), while number 8 was 6.1 × 4.1 m (25.01 m2).
No evidence for flooring was found, which suggests that they consisted of suspended wooden floorboards. A few small objects may have fallen through gaps between the boards, although we could not separate these from those contained within the demolition deposits that eventually covered them. Small pits and a pile of sand in number 8 show that the ground floor can hardly have been domestic in character and that the floorboards were removed some time before demolition. Nevertheless, the house seems to have remained in domestic use until 1936, if the documentary evidence is to be trusted. It is possible that the family in occupation was connected with the operation of a forge built against the end wall of the house more closely than the other residents. We can only speculate about living conditions inside the house!