First sight I thought this looks a veritable old building but doing this blog has taught me nothing is ever quite what it seems. A wee plaque, so often my source of information, explains how the expansion of the cattle market drove the building of these replacement Tudor style almshouses in 1848. Despite, or perhaps because of, being at the cutting edge of the Industrial Revolution our Victorians were seemingly so backward looking stylistically.
Anyhow here it is close by the entrance to the Walks, opposite the Library and near where the town mill would have stood that I mentioned yesterday. A cattle market in the centre of town may have had a certain financial appeal to overcome the obvious odorous downside but it closed down long ago; that space is now the bus station in the modern-Elizabethan style.
Those twiddly bits and fancy windows could have paid for a building twice the size ... but reason not the need, eh!
