Looking through the history of Ropetackle – what an eccentric place! As well as the ropemaking and shipbuilding past there were, in Victorian times, ancient buildings still standing, quaint sounding cottages, warehouses, a gas works and, spookily, a mortuary alongside an incinerator! In Little High Street there were houses with strange, shop-like windows and this mysterious looking architectural protrusion.
Is it what was left of a partly demolished house; was it built like that to fit into a small space or did it have a special purpose? The 1872 map also refelects its irregularity as part of the longer building to which it was attached. It all adds to a certain air of mystery and antiquity to the area.
Lofty added:
The photo below shows how the white house adjoining the Kings Head looked in 1973.
By then the mystery house had been demolished and had been replaced by a car park – I can’t find any photos of that building unfortunately.
Perhaps it was the tiny one up, one down accommodation 13 feet by 8 feet at Ropetackle reported by an article in the Sussex Agricultural Express in 1892, where Frederick Parsons and his wife and six children once lived in what were very cramped conditions. Such conditions were not that unusual for those times though. Even in the 1920’s and 30’s the Bennett family of nine lived in a similar sized house in Church Street – it still exists. One of the Bennett children told me how they would hoist their crippled father, a cobbler, up and down from the bedroom each day.
The 1891 census shows Frederick Parsons and his family as the first entry at Ropetackle but you probably know censuses are notorious for not always being in correct order.
We also know from the censuses that more than one household often lived in one property but with (apparently) each house/resident being numbered (in the directories) it suggests (to me) the directories are showing one house/one resident. If that is so then the numbering must include the properties on both sides of the Little High Street as there are only eleven from the back of the West End Stores in the High Street westwards to the corner of Ropetackle Cottages then northwards for the remainder.
I also tried using the directories but for 1891 and 1899. As you say there were 14 properties in 1891 but 1899 has 16. Could this be partly due to when the house backing on to the King’s Head was split into two?
Trying to compare two directories is also fraught with problems. There are so many changes from one directory to another as people’s stay in rented properties was often short lived. Some of the names though do coincide – No.2 Bradford, 8 Wicks, 10 Laker, 11 Bailey, 13 Grinstead.
