Page 123 - It's a Rum Life Book 3 "Ivy House Tales 1970 to 1984"

demanding cups of tea.
Harry was a bachelor and lived very simply in a little one up and two down cottage in a
long row of what had originally been workman’s cottages of the late 1790’s.

PARKINSON and NEW BOLINGBROKE
The whole village had been built at that time by a gentleman called Parkinson.
Her was the estate manger for Sir Joseph Banks the esteemed botanist whose home was
just down the road at Revesby.
(John) Parkinson bankrupted himself in his various endeavours but managed to build our
village, New Bolingbroke, as a new town between 1790 and 1800.
Called New Bolingbroke because Old Bolingbroke and its castle ruins, the home of Henry
the Fourth and his father John of Gaunt was also just down the road on the edge of the
Banks estate at the foot of the Lincolnshire Wolds.

Parkinson also planted a forest just outside Woodhall (Spa) and started a coal mine in the
same town.
This was the cause of his undoing because the miners never seemed to find enough coal,
just sufficient to keep his expectations going, in the meantime the mine kept filling with
water.
If only he had been in the next century he would have been the one to make his fortune
with the mineral waters pouring into his mine! The creation of the spa town!

Incidentally, the house we lived in attached to the maltings had been the Parkinson home,
the principal house in the village and we had purchased it from a gentleman called Peter
Lely who was very proud of a self portrait painted by a long dead relative hanging in one of
the larger bedrooms. The original painter of that portrait was of course the court painter to
Charles the second and his contemporaries.

Harry’s Hubbard’s cottage was part of this New Town which also originally boasted a
candleworks, rope factory, town hall, row upon row of workmen’s cottages and a complete
London crescent of town houses in the centre facing the town hall.
Picture showing part of the Crescent in the
centre of the “new town”.

Below: the Town hall as restoration began.

Two of the new windows fitted, opening up
the bricked up arches that had been close
for a hundred years or so.

123