Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

BUCKDEN’S BUILDINGS 95 CHAPTER 3/ BUCKDEN’S BUILDINGS Beth Davis Beth Davis is an architectural historian and lecturer, and compiled the schedule of listed buildings for the Cambridgeshire resurvey in the 1980s Introduction uckden has always been important as a welcome stop for travellers going to and from London. It became a pied-à-terre for the bishops of Lincoln for several hundred years: some indeed made their home here; others used it as a summer palace. Although they had several residences to choose from, Buckden was ideally situated between Lincoln and London at the ‘centre’ of their huge diocese. Five even chose to be buried in the parish church rather than in their cathedral. The coaching days of the late seventeenth century brought further prosperity to Buckden with the recognisable building and rebuilding of the two great coaching inns. The railway, arriving in the mid nineteenth century, temporarily brought an end to the trade of the coaching inns but this began to recover before the end of the century with the increasing popularity of bicycling (especially long-distance road racing), a recovery consolidated in the early twentieth century by the rise of motor transportation. The Great North Road became a vital trunk road in the later twentieth century and now, as the A1 bypass, takes through traffic away from the High Street. The buildings of Buckden reflect all these changes as well, of course, as the economic changes in the local countryside from medieval manorial control to the enclosure of the open fields in the early nineteenth century; these successive changes of land ownership have influenced new and old buildings in the town, where the fortunes of individual owners have been clearly expressed in their homes. The present day need to house an ever-growing population in the countryside is shown by the 1960s’ expansion of the township on the east side with planned housing estates named with historic references to Buckden’s past. Buckden has a remarkable range of buildings; just by walking around the streets it is possible to see buildings dating from the medieval period down to our own times; it is noticeable that the materials they are built from not only vary from building to building but have varied in each century. Some buildings have been altered and extended, and others have replaced earlier buildings on ancient sites. The church and the palace, the inns and pubs, gentry houses, yeoman farmhouses, cottages and cottage rows all show this variety and are mixed together along the older village streets . In the medieval and post medieval periods, masonry buildings of brick and stone were the most prestigious; the materials for these buildings had to be hauled from a distant source or were expensive in fuel to manufacture and were therefore not used by the common people. They found their building materials locally from the land—the woodlands and hedgerows and the farmyard. Timber-framing was the traditional form of building in Huntingdonshire up to the late seventeenth century when good building timber became scarce and brick was more easily available. Building styles changed and were clearly influenced by fashion and the technology of new materials; wealth and social needs have always played their part in the type and quality of buildings. All these variations have contributed to the characteristics that have produced such a variety in Buckden and help us to date the buildings in each century. The survival of buildings over the centuries depended largely on their being in continuous use. It goes without saying that buildings all need to be maintained and lived in; those that were abandoned were demolished, or partly demolished and replaced. Some buildings have been recorded by deeds, maps, manorial records and surveys, and others have left their imprint in the ground to be discovered by later disturbance; but many have been forgotten. Four building surveys have been carried out in Huntingdonshire in the twentieth century. The earliest was in 1926 for the the Royal Commission’s inventory of the historic monuments of Huntingdonshire, the records made at that time being kept in the National Monument Record in Swindon. The Victoria County History for Huntingdonshire was produced B