Spotlight on Winsover Road John Cleary from the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society takes a look at this historic road.
The oldest surveyed map of Spalding, the Grundy Map of 1732, hangs in The Spalding Gentlemen’s Society’s museum. It was prepared by the surveyor and drainage engineer John Grundy as his entrance gift on joining the Society. Spalding is shown to be a small town clustered around its marketplaces and open fields close to the town-centre. The major difference from today’s street-plan is the presence of a second river, the River Westlode, running past the Sheep Market to join the Welland. Today the course is marked respectively by Westlode Street, New Road, Chapel Lane, Winsover Road and Bourne Road to Pode Hole and the Pode Hole Pumping Station. This last is the clue to the mystery of the vanished river. In another ancient map, in the National Archives in Kew in London, painted by Monks on parchment about 700 years ago and shown at one of our lectures, we saw a small waterway leading from the well at Bourne
to Spalding Priory via Monk’s House on Monk’s House Lane and St Thomas’s Lane (a source of fresh water for the priory). Following King Henry VIII’s Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1538 this would have been used as a canal for transport to and from Bourne. After The Adventurers drained Deeping Fen in the 1790s they installed powerful pumps at Pode Hole which diverted the waters from the Westlode into Vernatt’s Drain. The Spalding Westlode dried up and was used as a roadway.
line from Peterborough to Boston, and it took two years, 1848 to 1850, to complete. The main function of the new railway system was to move produce to the London markets to command London (higher) prices.
Winsover Road
New businesses were established in Winsover Road such as coal merchants and an iron foundry to utilise the heavy raw materials brought in. In the rail boom years, lines to Lincoln, King’s Lynn and Bourne were built to collect farm produce for onward transport to London. Marshalling yards were also built as a result of this.
In his description of the Parish of Spalding in 1740 Maurice Johnson junior, the ‘Antiquary’, founder of the Spalding Gentlemen’s Society, says ‘the hamlet of Windsover stretches from the Priory site to Hawthorn Bank’. Thus by 1850 Winsover Road had become a wide straight road with few large houses, probably small farms, leading to open fenland, beyond the town bank.
Now road haulage has taken over this task and the only heavy lorries in Winsover Road are those delivering goods to the supermarkets like Sainsbury’s and Aldi that are built on the sites of the marshalling yard and foundry respectively. The line to Peterborough and Lincoln escaped Dr Beeching’s axe and still takes hardy commuters to London daily.
A Victorian map in our archives also shows us the projected course of the Great Northern Railway and the site of the railway station which would transform this sleepy country lane into the bustling urban space it is today. Five hundred men were employed to build the
Final Thought Thus Winsover has gone from waterway to country lane to tarmac to railway in one millennium. Where next?
Did you know?
Winsover road used to be spelt as Windsover. The quote from 1740 is not a spelling mistake but how the road used to be named!
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