Towards the conclusion of a ‘Crime and Crinolines in Clifton’ walking tour, the guide looked directly above Smaller Footprints and said she wondered about the ‘Portman House’ that is embossed there in stone. Grant said he would attempt to find out. When I (Lewis) joined, it was natural that I would be tasked with investigating as a recent History MA graduate.
I started with newspaper and map archives. Assuming that ‘Portman House’ was a brand or a company, I was expecting to find advertisements, job vacancies or other business information published in local newspapers such as the Bristol Mercury and the Western Daily Press.
I also explored the maps available to me provided by the fantastic website ‘Know Your Place’, published by Bristol City Council in collaboration with the Bristol Archives.
These maps, with the most complete maps starting in the 1740s, offer insight into the past ownership and use of the land. They indicate the shop and the buildings surrounding it were built in the 1860s at the latest.
The shop, 9 Regent Street, now a split premises appears first as a whole shopfront. Before it was built, the spot was a garden and a farmer’s field as seen in the maps below:
1746-1803 Map, courtesy of Know Your Place
1823 Ashmead Map, courtesy of Know Your Place
1874 Ashmead Map, courtesy of Know Your Place, showing 9 Regent Street
I then moved on to digging around in the newspaper archive. Here I came across advertisements for Portman House with the address of 9 Regent Street dating from the 1860s.
The notices, advertising job vacancies for seamstresses, dress-makers and skirt-makers, hints at a millinery and a tailors specialising in women’s clothing. For example, in 1874, an advertisement was printed by Portman House requesting, “Good Assistants to the Dress and Mantle (a cloak-like garment) Making.”
Job adverts as stated above continued to be published throughout the 1870s looking for people skilled in the tailoring profession.
In 1878 an intriguing story was printed in the Bristol Mercury. There was a feathery thief about! Unfortunately, the thief wasn’t some Disney-esk anthropomorphic Robin Hood figure, but a woman by the name of Elizabeth Sage, a domestic servant. Elizabeth had apparently stolen ten ostrich feathers, a couple of other feathers and around 90 yards (82 metres) of silk from the owner of Portman House tailors, Mr and Mrs Dyer. Elizabeth was fined £3 for her escapade, equivalent to around £250 in today’s money.
Newspaper extract detailing the arrest of Elizabeth Sage.
2nd March 1878, Bristol Mercury, ‘Bristol Police Courts’
Another bizarre story printed in the local papers in 1885 was about a resident of 9 Regent Street who was magically cured of her blindness. Mrs A Richards who had apparently been blind for six years previously, was cured in three minutes by an Indian Oracalist. This strange story did not go into any details and I’m unconfident in its veracity, but it’s nice to be gaining sight of this history.
While the tailors seemed to occupy the building for most of the nineteenth century, there were hints to the building being used for different purposes. The auctioneers and an estate agent, Edward T Parker & Sons, had their offices here, and Mr Dyer might have had a side business as a ‘cab proprietor’ (a Victorian taxi service).
9 Regent Street was certainly a hub of activity and a central part of the community much like it is today. While the research has just covered a short amount of time in the nineteenth century, it opens up the question to the professions and people who were here in the twentieth century.
Learning about the history of the building that you spend so much time in not only creates a greater sense of connection to the building but also makes one more curious. What conversations did these walls hear? What did it look like? What did it smell like?
I hope this blog was entertaining for you and I encourage everyone to research as much as they can about their own houses – you never know what you might find!
(Access to local newspapers provided by Gale Resources accessed as via student log in provided by the University of Bristol; banner photo, “Regent Street, Clifton,” postcard, c. 1909 (Bristol Archives, 43207/9/12/258))
