Last updated at 14:35, Monday, 30 November 2009

THE clue is in the name – the Coach House in Hexham was built to be one of the Georgian Age’s far more attractive versions of today’s motorway service stations.

Original features: The Coach House in Temperley Place, Hexham

Positioned handily at the western extremity of the town and at the mouth of the highroad leading to Allendale, Penrith and Alston, the Coach House would have been an ideal stopping place for travellers and their carriages. It still has three great archways where coaches swept in.

The Hexham to Alston road existed from 1762 or earlier, though it was probably a fairly primitive track. In 1778, when the Coach House was new, a Turnpike Trust was set up to update the route from Summerrods Bar, near Lowgate, to Alston.

The Summerrods turnpike gate, where travellers paid a toll, meant the road raised its own funds and the town had cash to keep its important routes in good nick. That was the plan, anyway. But by 1800 an Act of Parliament was needed to keep the Summerrods turnpike in “effectual repair”.

In the 1820s the famous “Tar” McAdam arrived to bring the North Pennine’s roads into the modern age. John Loudon McAdam, the man who invented ‘macadamisation’ – or tarmac – supervised the resurfacing of the roads from Alston to Penrith, Brampton and Hexham.

The newly-built Coach House was a transport hub despite being mostly surrounded by meadows – with the turnpike road in front, and a track behind linking travellers with the Tyne Ferryboat.

The Coach House was possibly used by the pub which still stands close by – The Fox Inn.

The detailed Hexham map of 1896 shows this hostelry as “West End Inn”. Modern adverts for The Fox give its address as “West End Terrace, opposite the Alston Turn”,which suggests an old memory of its Alston turnpike road trade.

Anyway, by 1826 the Coach House had a nearer connection. A fine house for the wealthy grain merchant family of Temperley (or Temperly) had been attached to it, and the Coach House probably became Temperley property.

When Edinburgh surveyor John Wood made his plan of Hexham that year, the whole western section of Hexham’s Hencotes had taken the name Temperly Place.

The Temperleys had been steadily climbing the Hexham social ladder through the 18th century. Nicholas Temperley, born just before England’s bit of bother with the Colonies in 1776, was listed as a “grocer, tea dealer, butter and bacon factor” and was living in “Hencoates” according to Pigot’s Directory of 1834. He was not listed among Hexham’s “Gentry and Nobility”.

But the next generation, William Angus Temperley was a bigger fish in Hexham’s pond.

This corn-merchant’s grain store was among the finest and most elaborate buildings in baroque Beaumont Street. W.A. Temperley stumped up more than £1,000 for a grand Italian-style villa just outside town. His Westfield House later became the trendy health spa, Hexham Hydro.

Though they had the posh villa, the Temperleys were still found in Temperley Place for the 1881 census.

The widowed W.A. lived at number 3, next door to the Coach House which is number 4/5. His twin 21-year-old children, Charles and Anne, lived with him. At number 2 lived Sarah Temperley, a widow in her 50s.

Number 1 Temperley Place was home to iron founder Thomas Davison, his wife Elizabeth, and baby Henry. The 1856 map of Hexham shows a “Davisons Buildings” opposite the Coach House, so the Davisons were obviously big noises in town society, but they had some way to go to match their neighbours.

The Temperleys were devout members of the Congregationalist sect and in 1869 they helped finance an impressive new church in Hencotes, replacing the old Ebenezer Chapel in Broadgates where many generations of Temperleys had been married.

With John Ridley and William Robb (of the department store clan) W.A. Temperley founded the Hexham Proprietary School for children – including girls – whose families could not afford Hexham Grammar School fees.

W.A. added his influential voice to the urgent cause of better sanitation for Hexham in the middle of the century. When the town’s senior surgeon Robert Stokoe rather tactlessly said he had always considered Hexham to be a healthy place in spite of the odd epidemic, W.A. Temperley hit the nail saying: “If the town is so healthy the average mortality should be lower.”

So W.A. Temperley’s memorial after his death in 1898 was a fitting one – Hexham’s marketplace cross with its fountain and trough for clean, safe water.

Mid-20th century residents of the Coach House are thought to have been the Moffat/Moffatt family. The Moffats apparently had various businesses in Hexham. The Coach House became a dry goods store, with the tenants living in the old coach drivers’ accommodation above the stables which now stored boxes of dried fruit and fish.

John Moffatt was an ironmonger with a shop in the Market Place. And when a fire broke out , pub-goers from the Fox had to rescue 88-year-old Jessie Moffat from her Temperley Place home.

But the most recent owner of the Coach House concentrated on the old Temperley tradition for beautifying Hexham. John Askell won a Hexham Civic Society Award in 2002 for his refurbishment of 4/5 Temperley Place – “Work contributing to the visual amenities of the town”.

John made the Coach House a labour of love, uncovering original features like shutters and fireplaces concealed under hardboard panels, and the house’s golden stonework hidden under rendering. He re-pointed walls, re-balanced chimneys, and retiled the roof.

“I found it all in brilliant condition, so thank goodness they did cover it up!” said John.

l The Coach House, 4/5 Temperley Place, Hexham, is for sale through RPS Residential of Priestpopple.

First published at 09:52, Friday, 13 November 2009
Published by http://www.hexhamcourant.co.uk