Houses in Old Portsmouth |
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| Click on photos to enlarge. Notes in italics from Hampshire and the Isle of Wight by Nikolaus Pevsner and David Lloyd (1967) Yale University Press, New Haven and London. |
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| Old Portsmouth was decayed and picturesque in the 1930s, savagely bombed in the Second World War, and a partial ruin for many years after. Today it has undergone a strange metamorphosis into a fashionable residential quarter; many of the surviving old houses have been discreetly restored and new flats ... have risen on most of the bombed sites. | ||||
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| Crossing of Lombard Street and St Thomas Street. Lombard Street leads NW past the E end of the cathedral to the pleasantest series of old houses surviving in Old Portsmouth. ... A group on the street corner, including Nos 1-5 Lombard Street, middle to late C17, two-storeyed houses with Dutch gables but with their facades stuccoed and simplified in Late Georgian times (early C19). | ||||
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| Lombard Street Nos 7 and 9 are of the late C18 Portsmouth type, with shallow bow windows (that of No. 7 canted, No. 9 segmental) on the first floor; No. 7 is in grey brick with red dressings and has a nice doorcase with engaged columns and flat hood ; No. 9's doorcase is simpler. No. 11 has a shell-patterned semi-circular panel over the doorway (another local stylism) and No. 13 a square canopy over over its door. The line of houses continues with a pleasant hotchpotch of homely facades ... . | ||||
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| South-east corner of St Thomas Street-Lombard Street. | ||||
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| On the SE east side of St Thomas Street are more pleasant houses decently restored, No. 51 being especially endearing, with delicate Adamish decoration with urns and swags in the fascia above the shallow segmental first-floor bow window. Are they genuine, or a piece of recent tasteful decoration work? | ||||
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| High Street,
opposite the cathedral ... retains a fair amount of its pre-C20 urban
character. First there is the Dolphin Hotel, three-storeyed, with two
canted bays on the first and second floors and a handsome entrance
feature, with Doric fluted columns and entablature ... (and the
wording Portsmouth's Oldest Pub). Further along is the Monks pub, grey and red brick and a segmental bay on the first floor. Then the Sally Port Inn with quite a distinguished Late Georgian facade, pairs of canted bay windows going all the way up, and the added embellishments on the first floor of pediments over the central windows of each of the bays and over the window between them, immediately over the entrance. Then, on the corner of Grand Parade, an Early Victorian block, effective in scale and proportion, though plain except for the rusticated ground storey with tall round arches in the characteristic local pattern. |
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| Beyond Grand Parade, the last block of
houses on the south side of the High Street and looking up Battery Row.
Much of the redevelopment of housing in Old Portsmouth has blended in
well with the traditional style. In the last picture, the rear of that block and Grand Parade, looking back towards the High Street (and Spinnaker Tower Tower in the distance). |
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| View of houses in Grand Parade, the
Royal Garrison Church, and the statue
of Lord Nelson. The inscriptions and more
details about the statue can be seen
here (Portsmouth Memorials website). Finally a close-up of houses in Grand Parade: The row of houses offers extreme contrasts in scale in rather an engaging way: one very massive Early Victorian four-storeyed house; next to it some very dinky Regency ones, with quite spirited displays of ironwork ... |
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| Map of Portsmouth | ||||
| More Portsmouth Buildings in Astoft | ||||
