For those of you interested in learning about individual properties on Westgate, last April we began to post details of the buildings at the conservation end of the Westgate which can be found from various sources. In these articles you can find a list of the properties protected by Historic England listing, details of the renumbering of the street as some records still record the old number, and research on the shape of the street by a resident.
To further flesh out this catalogue, we are now turning our attention to any details about individual properties that may be available. The following extract is from The Building of Georgian Chichester by local historian Alan Green (Phillimore 2007) and is here reproduced with his permission. This should be read in conjunction with the above articles to get a complete view of this property.
On a more modest scale, no. 17 is a typical Regency rebuild. Its three-storey single frontage under a slate roof is stuccoed and the front door is recessed within an elliptical arch, and approached by steps up from the street. It is another example of how adjacent properties in Westgate ‘flow’ around each other, backing onto the garden of No. 19, its neighbour to the west, and having only a tiny courtyard to itself.*
Abutting this house to the west is No. 19 whose impossible disposition of windows declares this to be not a brick rebuild but a re-facing of a timber-framed house. At its west end the timber framing, which is filled with herringbone brickwork, is exposed, but its east end now abuts No. 17. When No. 17 was rebuilt it used the existing end of No. 19 as the party wall and in its ground-floor front room the herringbone and timber wall, which matches the other end, has now been exposed.
What Alan Green calls ‘flow ‘ can also be observed between nos. 44 to 12 on the north side of the street and between Nos. 27 to 37 on the south side further down. Residents on the north side are however of the view that this curious division of the gardens and frontages has a lot to do with the Brewery manipulating the accommodation over time and dividing up the properties to get more in. This kind of ‘flow’ was still being repeated on Westgate up to the 1980s, when the developer of the Georgian Priory divided the gardens and frontages of nos. 1 to 9 somewhat arbitrarily in order to create more individual properties to sell than the visual street frontage implies.
