These photographs by Charles Wardell of The Angel inn were taken in the mid-1960s when it was under threat of demolition.

The original plans for town development would have swept everything away, together with the early buildings on the upper south side of Chantry Street, all of which are now considered prime examples of Andover’s heritage assets. Those plans were altered after a public outcry and a successful petition organised by Martin Loveridge.

The Angel is the oldest building in Andover, has been hailed as Hampshire’s most significant example of a fifteenth century inn and is Grade II listed.

It was constructed soon after the fire that engulfed most of the town in 1435, destroying all the wooden buildings in its path.

In those days, the town was much smaller and only just beginning to expand from the upper High Street into the main market place we know today.

The road to London ran up Newbury Street and along Vigo Road and The Angel was thus in a prime position to capture passing trade, with its gateway facing directly up the street.

Winchester College, which was founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, recognised Andover as both growing and strategically-placed.

After being presented with Andover priory and its lands in 1414 the college began buying properties around the town to lease out.

The Angel inn was the college’s major project after the fire but it was not until 1445 that work began on the ‘void ground’ as it was called, taken to mean that it was an empty plot on which the previous building had been destroyed.

Whether that was an earlier ‘College Inn’ is uncertain.

The 1444 contract for building The Angel still survives at Winchester College and contains much detail on its design and intended construction.

It was to be an inn of four sides or ranges, built around a central courtyard.

Most of the first floor was given over to chambers, with the more luxurious quarters facing out onto the High Street in the cross-wings at either end.

The ground floor of the cross wings were public parlours.

Between them was an open hall stretching from floor to roof on the south side of the gateway.

The timber framed façade along the High Street would have been fashionably ‘jettied’ at first- floor level - an overhang providing extra space on the first floor above street level.

Such work can be seen in today’s 84 High Street where later facades were removed in 1987 to uncover the original construction.

Around the inner courtyard at first-floor level there was an open timbered gallery or walkway, with an outside staircase allowing access to the numerous chambers without having to negotiate the public rooms downstairs.

The cross wings, sited at either end of the High Street range, still exist – the rear of the northern one can be seen today - but they are masked by the brick front that replaced the original street façade, probably in 1775, covering up the (by then) archaic timber framing and jettying of three centuries earlier, as well as the thatched roof.

However, much of the internal roof timbers survive, including an unusual scissor brace or cruck arrangement to the beams and rafters.

At some point, much of the original inn was demolished, leaving just those parts we see today.

What is now the bar area was once a stable block, albeit with sleeping chambers above and the parts south of the gateway were converted into two tenements.

Like most ancient inns, The Angel has claimed several royal visitors – King John, Edward I and Edward II are three but all of these kings reigned long before the inn was built.

Henry VII may have stayed there after seeing off the pretender Perkin Warbeck, while Catherine of Aragon is said to have stopped at The Angel on her way from Plymouth to London in 1501 to marry the ill-fated Prince Arthur, Henry VIII’s elder brother.

In 1688, the Catholic James II may have stayed at the inn when retreating from William of Orange but it has been speculated that his host, John Pollen, then lessee of the priory, would have provided his sovereign with better quarters than a public inn.

In 1594 Richard Pope became the innkeeper and when he died in 1632, the surviving inventory of his goods reveals 26 chambers, all with names such as the Half Moon, the Cross Keys, the Crown, the Star, the Falcon etc.

Pope was reasonably wealthy - worth almost £450 at the time of his death - but he is also noted as the great grandfather of the poet Alexander Pope.

Richard’s grandson, the poet’s father, was baptised in St Mary’s church, just a stone’s throw from the inn.

The Angel became Andover’s temporary town hall in 1825 when the construction of the present Guildhall was carried out and the large market room - the ground floor parlour north of the gateway - was taken over for corporation business.

Five years later, 300 Swing rioters carrying pitchforks and bludgeons, as a precursor to their march on Tasker’s ironworks at Upper Clatford, marched on The Angel when the local magistrates and farmers were discussing the raising of workers’ wages.

Two of them burst in to have their say and indeed it was resolved by the 70 farmers present, whether out of generosity or fear, to pay a higher wage.

Quarley farmer and JP Richard Bethel Cox is said to have addressed the outside gathering from the first-floor window in an effort to get them to disperse peacefully, for which he was called a ‘fat slug’.

Before 1793, The Angel was leased from Winchester College by the resident innkeeper but in that year Charles Heath of the London Street brewery became the lessee and the Heath family continued to hold it until 1847 when the brewery was sold up.

The annual rental was £5.13.4d but at each renewal of the lease, a payment called a fine had to be paid, the customary amount for The Angel being £50.

The leasehold reverted to innkeeper John Penfold in 1849 but ten years later John Poore, another local brewer, signed a new lease, renewing it again in 1869.

During the twentieth century Winchester College began selling off their Andover properties to lessees who wished to buy them.

Consequently, in 1920, John Poore’s son Philip Henry Poore, then the 88-year-old proprietor of the brewery which was sold up in the same year, bought both The Angel and 90 High Street (The Silent Man) for £4,250, probably to provide an income for his two unmarried daughters.

Today, after almost 600 years, The Angel continues to serve its customers and visitors.

Now under the ownership of Greene King, it remains a rare survivor of the fifteenth century town.

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