Shrewsbury Matters: Beaming about a Peach of a building
My wild mushroom and spinach risotto was delicious, and the company of my family, as always, a joy, but none of that stopped me admiring the extraordinary curved beams in the wall of this restaurant writes Phil Gillam.
We were in The Peach Tree in Abbey Foregate the other night, celebrating the birthday of our middle son (a funny phrase – 'middle son' – I know, but how else do you describe the son who is not the eldest and not the youngest?) and we were having a good laugh, discussing a New Zealand-based comedy duo called Flight of the Conchords.
We were giggling like children as we recalled a video we'd seen of the Conchords being asked to compose and record a charity record for Comic Relief, but, as I say, these beams had caught my eye.
You can, I have discovered, laugh heartily and view architectural gems at the same time. Is this multi-tasking?
Anyway . . .
Not everyone who visits The Peach Tree (part of the C21 nightclub complex) will appreciate that they are in fact sitting in one of Shrewsbury's oldest buildings.
Take a closer look at this range of structures and it turns out that numbers 18-21 Abbey Foregate are, in truth, two cruck-framed houses that have been dated by dendrochronological evidence to the first half of the fifteenth century.
Numbers 18-19 date from 1408 (just five years after the Battle of Shrewsbury) and numbers 20-21 from 1430.
Almost unbelievably (I say 'almost' because in actual fact I remember this very clearly myself) this range of buildings was used as a garage from the 1920s up until the 1980s. Yes – a garage!
