North Parade, Grantham: houses of John Amos, Windsor chair maker of Little Gonerby WS 149

North Parade, Grantham: houses of John Amos, Windsor chair maker of Little Gonerby WS 149

Little Gonerby is closely associated with the early Windsor chair makers of Lincolnshire but if you study any recent map of the Grantham area then you will not find no mention of it. However what you will find is the village of Great Gonerby which straddles the Great North Road about two miles north of Grantham. There is sometimes the name of Gonerby Hill Foot which is even closer to Grantham but nowhere will you find Little Gonerby. So where is this often mentioned place?   John Amos lived there, amongst others. My curiosity was aroused even more when I discovered in his will (written 1838 ) that he intended to leave two houses that he had built on North Parade and that he was living there at the time of the 1841 census under the heading of Little Gonerby.

My research has turned up the fact that in the eighteenth century the town of Grantham consisted of three areas: Spittlegate to the south, Grantham itself around the church of St.Wulfram and Little Gonerby to the north, all three joined together with no clear demarcation, to make up Grantham itself.

What has made research easier, however, was the fact that the area of Little Gonerby was just inside the southern most boundary of Lord Brownlow's estate based at Belton House. Maps survive of this part of Grantham with the Nottingham road dividing it off from the rest of the settlement. An early map, which is frustratingly undated but I guess is about 1750 and in the Brownlow depositions at the Lincoln Archives, shows no more than 15 houses. The most useful map is in the Enclosure Award for 1808 which shows the fields, roads and houses, which have grown to about 25 in total. Intriguingly it shows the names of some of the existing owner-occupiers, which include Richard Hubbard, Thomas Wilson and William Allen. Unfortunately the fold of this ancient document goes right through the settlement and as a consequence it is impossible to see who occupied which property. What makes this more galling is the fact that it is perfectly possible to walk around this part of Grantham and identify these substantial houses easily today.

John Amos would have lived in one of these houses before he brought some land off Peter Vere and built two houses on North Parade. As nearly all the houses remain on this fine terrace of late Georgian houses, I set about to see if I could locate his two. On looking through the 1841 census online I was frustrated as the photographic reproduction was so poor and the handwritting so faint that I had to go to the Lincoln Library to view it on their microfiche. Much of it was barely legible but I did find John Amoss (75) living with Louisa Amoss (25). His occupation was given as a chairmaker. Louisa was his youngest daughter born 1814 (the ages in the 1841 census are rounded to within 5 years. There were two female servants living there as well, both aged 15.

North Parade is a long row of terrace houses on the east ide of the old A1 road as it leaves Grantham and opposite there is mainly 1930s houses, so I supposed that the census taker would have started at one end of the terrace and worked his way to the other end. From the census return I counted 17 houses on one side of Amos and 18 to the other. So I went to Grantham and started at the end of North Parade closest to the town and counted 17 houses and found a pair of handed houses ( pictured above with Green and Red doors with a passage way door in between). Then I counted a further 18 houses which brought me to the end of the row. While this does not prove that these were the two houses built by Amos, there is a good chance they are, but more research needs to be done.

More evidence may still turn up as there is a large amount of documents deposited with the Lincoln archives from the Brownlow Estate which have yet to be catalogued.

© William Sergeant 2014 and 2020