Tuesday 28 February 2012

Updates to tollhouse pages

I have added pages for the four tollhouses I photographed on Sunday. They can be found on my tollhouse website, the Hampshire page is here.

I have come up with what I think is a sensible design for the website. It should allow me to extend it to cover all tollhouses in the whole country quite easily.

Sunday 26 February 2012

Some Hampshire tollhouses

Emily and I went for a drive this afternoon and visited 4 of the tollhouses in our local area.

First was the one I used to live in, in Chineham, Basingstoke.


Then we went down the B3400 to Whitchurch.


Then headed south of Andover to Wherwell.


And finally north of Andover to Hurstbourne Tarrant.


I will upload more photos to the relevant tollhouse pages over at my tollhouse wiki

4 Hampshire tollhouses photographed

We bagged the ones in Whitchurch, Wherwell, Hurstborne Tarrant and my old one in Chineham.
Photos should be available this evening.

Collecting photos

Location: A33, Chineham, Hampshire RG24, UK
Emily and I are spending the afternoon photographing some of our local tollhouses

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Hampshire tollhouse locations

I have completed my initial search of sources to find as many tollhouses as I can in Hampshire. The results are stored in a kml file here. This can be downloaded and opened in Google Earth or imported into Google Maps. If you do the latter it should give you a view that looks like the map below:


View Hampshire tollhouses in a larger map


I now have to choose the next county to work on. If any readers have a preference let me know, otherwise I will probably start with one of Hampshire's neighbours and then work onwards from there.

Updating map

I have been adding Hampshire tollhouses to the UK map page.

As well as the map, I am planning to put a kml file for each county on the blog, starting with Hampshire tomorrow. This should make it easier for people who want to visit a few of the interesting and historic buildings to plan their route.

Thursday 16 February 2012

National Road - USA

The National Road was the first federally built road in the USA, it is now mostly known as route 40. Wikipedia has a nice page on the road here. From reading that page it seems that three tollhouses remain on the road, one in Maryland and two in Pennsylvania. I have pictures of two of them.

Maryland tollhouse, Lavale



I visited this one February on week-long drive I took from Boston to Washington via Niagara and Pittsburgh. I have added it to the rest-of-world map page and you can also find it on the map below


If you zoom the map out you will see that this one is well placed in a gap in the hilly ridge, making it one of the few routes to drive livestock or carriages from one side to the other.

Pennsylvania "Searight's Tollhouse"

I didn't actually take these pictures myself, my parents spotted the tollhouse and took them for me.

They clearly went there on a much warmer day!




I like the "...whatever name it be called..." bit to ensure no one can sneak a vehicle past by claiming it doesn't appear on the list.


Both of these tollhouses seem to be constructed to the same plan, but the Maryland one is rendered whereas the Pennsylvania one is left at the natural brick finish. The third remaining tollhouse is the Petersburgh tollhouse in Pennsylvania. I don't have my own photos of that one but if you look at streetview on google maps other people have.


If you look at the photos you will see that again the plan is the same, but this time the building is of stone construction and is not rendered.

Wednesday 15 February 2012

Near Hay-on-Wye

Location: Whitney Bridge, Hereford, County of Herefordshire HR3, UK
A couple of tollhouses I spotted near Hay-on-wye.

The first is controlling a tollbridge:


Don't be fooled by the dubious road surface, this is actually the B4350 although there is a speed restriction over the bridge.

As with all the pictures I am posting, the locations of these tollhouses is marked on the map on the UK map page.

The second pic from the Hay-on-Wye area is taken just outside Hay itself.


This tollhouse is on the B4350 again and is now a children's bookshop with a website here.

Near Malvern

Location: A449, Malvern, County of Herefordshire WR13, UK
OK, I have found more of my older pics of tollhouses.
This one is near Malvern, on the A449. Another picture can be found here, not much different to mine apart from the colour.

Listing details - Chineham tollhouse

Location: A33, Chineham, Hampshire RG24, UK
The national heritage listing for the Chineham tollhouse can be found here.

The description of the house in the list is a bit out of date. The original listing date is in 1984, so it must be after that time that the house was extended.

English Heritage give some advice on what you can do if you own a listed building here.

English Heritage did a photographic survey of all listed buildings in the early part of the 21st century. The Chineham tollhouse's page can be found here.

The Chineham tollhouse

Location: Chineham, Hampshire, UK
This is the tollhouse in Chineham, on the A33. It was at the southern end of the Reading-Basingstoke turnpike.



The octagonal building on the right is the original tollhouse. The wooden centre section and second octagonal building make up the extension, built 25-30 years ago. According to the deeds the road originally ran right up to the wall, in fact the house projected into it. A parcel of land was bought and attached to the property to allow garden all around the building. The current A33 runs behind the fence just visible on the far right of the picture.


The original part of the building is Grade II listed apparently.

Tuesday 14 February 2012

Map of tollhouses

I have added a map page on which I will put a pin for each tollhouse I know about. Click the tab near the top to see the page

Monday 13 February 2012

First!

I used to live in a tollhouse on the outskirts of Basingstoke. The original building was more than 200 years old and an extension built in the '80s more than doubled the size of the house.

I will dig out my own photos of the house, but for the time being it can be seen in several other places online, for instance: