This photograph of Wellington Terrace in South Street was taken by Charles Wardell in 1967.

Many readers may remember seeing it and possibly some may have lived there.

Access to these houses was via a path at the far end, as well as the line of steps to the right of the picture which is still a public footpath that leads into Winchester Road.

The houses were built by Sylvester William Smith, whose name cropped up in a previous column.

His mother was Susannah Smith of the White Bear inn, on the site that later became Baldock’s the tobacconist in the upper High Street.

He may have run the inn briefly, but Sylvester was a builder by trade who moved to London Street following his mother’s death in 1860 with the inn closing soon afterwards.

By 1880 he had moved to Sevenoaks where he opened an ironmonger’s shop.

Wellington Terrace was so-named because it was built at the end of a meadow that belonged to the Wellington inn, the frontage of which was in Winchester Street.

The site of the terrace and the former meadow is now the Winchester Road car park whereas the Wellington Centre has replaced the inn itself.

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Samuel Shaw was the third generation of the well-known shop-keeping family at 9 High Street and he was fascinated by the history of Andover, writing out numerous stories of the town that had been passed down over the years.

One of these directly involved him and the building of Wellington Terrace.

In digging the foundations for the terrace in 1868, a piece of Roman pavement comprising a pattern of 16 rows of white, red and black tesserae was discovered on the roof of a shed at the back of the Wellington inn.

The landlord William Deane showed it to Shaw who put it in his shop window, hoping to discover more about it.

It was assumed one of the workmen had found it amongst the soil from the building site and put it there but strangely none of them knew anything about it.

There were also two skeletons discovered there that were declared ‘ancient’ and buried in the churchyard.

Was this perhaps a former Roman site? The question was never answered and an assumption emerged that the 10x8 inch fragment of mosaic work must have been brought there together with the gravel and other material used for the foundations.

However, the rubble mixture had come only so far as Upper Clatford church and the gravel was from the stream at Charlton.

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Because the artefact was in such good condition, it surely could not have been lying in water.

Shaw wrote the whole story down and sent it in a letter to the Hampshire Chronicle in December 1868, mentioning that building had begun in the previous spring.

Another correspondent with whom Shaw had spoken, Charles S M Lockhart of St Mary Bourne who was the elder son of the local vicar, wrote the same week, saying that the height of the bank was about 30 feet and would once have sloped gently down to the river Anton.

He thought the area had certainly been dug out in order to form a place of defence.

Nothing more appears to have materialised but the discovery of some Romano-British burials during archaeological excavations in Winchester Street some years ago suggests that this may indeed have once been a place of early settlement.