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14. Rivermead Group of Historic Houses
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| A. Rivermead has features dating back from Tudor times in the stone-built wing parallel with the street; the east-west section is partly brick and has 18th-century features. The house forms a group with the long stone Barn behind it and with Malthouse Cottage, which is attached to Rivermead's southern end – in fact the structures overlap. The cottage is probably 17th century and was at first one house; by the 19th century it had been degraded into two cottages but it is now restored as one house; it has a stone and rubble ground floor and a timber-framed first floor; its plan is the "small house with lateral chimney" which Brunskill, the vernacular building specialist, describes as being commoner in counties further west. The barn, now converted, appears older than either of the houses; as a working malthouse it may have provided the money with which they were built in the early 19th century on the site of humbler buildings. As the fortunes of the cottage declined and those of the Malthouse rose, the Barn passed into the latter's ownership and was decorated, folly-style, with odd sculptures taken from other sites. |
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Rivermead doorknocker, © Toni Perrott |
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B. South of this group is the Thatched Cottage, much enlarged now, but substantial even in its early state as a 17th-century farmhouse belonging to the Smith family. In 1830, one Thomas Smith still held it, together with yards, barns, stables, rickyard and meadow on the other side of Church Way; this latter site is now the beginning of Abberbury Road. (See Iffley People, to be added). |
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Thatched cottage, acquiring new thatch, 1998. |
| C. On the plot north of Abberbury Road, there was in 1830 a block of four cottages and gardens, rebuilt with good stonework by the Parsons family of Hawkwell House in 1849 and thus known as Stone Cottages. The Parsons used them for their outdoor servants, and village legend says that Mr and Mrs Parsons used to march them all to church, swelling the already grand procession of indoor servants. It was the time when work in service was becoming more common in Iffley than field labouring or independent craft. Edward Cordrey (b.1884) grew up in one of these cottages and records that the four resident families he knew had 37children between them not, fortunately, all home at once. The block is now divided into three. (See Iffley People, to be added). |
 Stone Cottages |
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D. The next group of
buildings has to be disentangled from modern structures, but we have a
fine stone barn, mid-17th-century, and a stone house on
the street which has Tudor features inside, although it has been refaced
and extended. The big square garden behind the house approaches one end
of the barn, and it may be that the whole complex was a farm.
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Rivermead (on right) and Stone Cottages (centre left) in Churchway, date unknown. (Jeremy's, The Oxford Stamp Centre). |
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| The same location from the opposite direction, date unknown. (Jeremy's, The Oxford Stamp Centre). |
