Page 18 - Oundle Life June 2021

in the 19th- 20th- and 21st-centuries the cottage has been transformed from a single pile dwelling into a spacious double pile property with four-times the floor area.
occasion I discovered that two oddly-sized windows in the gable wall were almost certainly inserted after being removed from the rear wall around 1806 when the floor plan was doubled
1788
1810
Back in 2013 I was generously granted access by its current owners
to complete a measured survey of
the building as I set about unpicking its evolution. To measure a building
is to treat it as a primary source of information, and when you know what you are looking for, you discover all manner of gems. For instance, on this
Measured Surveys, rent records, and old maps reveal its evolution
in size.
Another rich source of primary
information when researching historic buildings are old postcards, photos, and old maps. With estate maps
and more recently (for the past 150 years) Ordnance Survey or O.S. maps, we possess a rich graphical device
for locating buildings and tracking
18
1880