Orchard Court - on the edge of the borough

Orchard Court isn’t a conventional alley. For many years, it formed part of the boundary of the borough, and appears to have once been a road towards Gloucester which by-passed the town centre. It joined Saffron Road, which aligns to the Iron Bridge and a path to the south. John Rogers, alley historian, remembers it as a country lane in the nineteenth century, with green hedges on either side. It is named for the large orchard which once occupied the hospital and surgery site. There was a stile at the bottom of the lane until 1901. In 1866 two lads, Henry Brown and Charles Oakey, were fined 1s (5p) each for smearing filth on the stile, but as their parents couldn’t afford to pay they were given a week’s hard labour instead.

In 1841 there were nine occupied dwellings in the court, housing forty-six people. These reduced by stages. By 1900, it had reduced to seven, through the conversion of four houses to two. At the end of 1937, the court was included in the slum clearance schedule. Only three dwellings were targeted. All at the lower, southern, end of the court. They were demolished in 1939, leaving the four that are there today. 

Orchard Court in Barton Street today

Orchard Court in Barton Street todayClick Image
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For some fifty years, in the middle of the nineteenth century, three generations of the Cooper and Cull family ran a school from the court. In 1880, when Alfred Cull took over from his sister Cecelia, he advertised it as a ‘Boys Middle Class School’.

Orchard Court’s best remembered resident, though, must be Granny Key; Nurse Rosa Key, who was the town’s midwife, delivering well over 600 babies. The last was during the war, when she was eighty years old.

At the end of the nineteenth century, Mr Papps, draper, had a house built in his orchard, which was entered by a gate in Orchard Court. This brought a great deal of activity to the court, with garden parties and, when Mr Willis, baker, bought the house it became home to the Orchard Court Tennis Club.

Vincent Yorke, president of the Hospital, bought Orchard House, as a site for the town’s new hospital. After a period of fundraising, including the 1931 pageant, work was able to start in 1934, preceded on 13^th October by a foundation stone being laid by Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone and granddaughter of Queen Victoria. The gates from Orchard Court were opened for visitors, which was probably the busiest day of the court’s long existence.

In 1945, as Prior’s Park was being extended, a proposal to build a road through Orchard Court, to join Queens Road was very seriously considered but eventually rejected in favour of Oldfield and Link Road. The court was saved because of concern about disruption to the hospital. A path from the Court to Prior’s Park was created, though, with a footbridge, designed to provide a route above the floods. This was the recently demolished ‘Legion’ bridge.

A very different history to that of the town centre alleys, but an interesting and important one nevertheless.

Census Data 1841-1891