The story behind

Have you ever wondered why one of the town’s grandest buildings sits on a corner set back from the High Street? The reason is because it was moved!

No 1 New Road, generally known as The Tudor House, is an imposing timberframed building at the corner of the High Street and New Road. Built around 1572, it originally stood in the High Street and was later known as the Hop Pole Inn. The initials W.B. (possibly those of William Brooke, a governor of Bromsgrove School in 1556) can be seen on the lintel above an upper window.

The house was part of a row of houses owned successively by Josiah Dineley, mercer, Richard Stanney, writing master, and Anthony Boulton, barber surgeon. In a deed of 1709, these premises included a brewhouse and a banquet house.

By 1793, two of the row had been refronted in brick, and the remaining timber-framed house had been divided into two properties, the southernmost of which was occupied as the Hop Pole by Joseph Brooke, innkeeper.

Bromsgrove had many coaching inns: the Hop Pole was not one of them, though coaches occasionally stopped there on their way between Worcester and Leicester during the 1820s.

By the 1850s the building’s future was in doubt. The Birmingham to Gloucester Railway had opened in 1841 and passed one mile to the east of Bromsgrove. A horse-drawn omnibus service from the Golden Cross Hotel met the trains and brought passengers and their luggage to and from the town.

The station was approached by a winding, narrow road, now known as Old Station Road and, as the popularity of the railways increased, it was recognised that a better route was needed..