| Warter...living in an estate village |
HomesB. Village housing - continued from previous page
(for plan of Warter c. 1910 see Plan 5)
By 1901 almost all the cottages in the village were new built in brick and slate. Out of some 40 cottages more than half had three or more bedrooms, as well as a living room and kitchen.
The cottage accommodation was greatly improved, both in quality and scale, compared with half a century before. But this was not so in every local village. The following description of a house at the brickyards at Seaton Ross in 1905 provides a contrast:
The house, occupied by Henry and Margaret Wilson and their four children aged 5 to 16, was a one-storeyed building, with two rooms on the ground floor. In the living room there was no furniture except a kettle, dripping tin, two tin mugs and a bowl on the washstand. There was no knife, fork or spoon in the place. In the kitchen there were some drain pipes, on which were planks and sacking filled with straw, which Mrs Wilson described as her husband's bed. There was no bed clothing whatever. There was a similar bed for the children, but neither fire nor food in the place.
Pocklington Weekly News 17 November 1905
Not all the cottages in Warter had been rebuilt by the early 20th century. In the centre of the village was Barrack Row, a terrace of six one-bedroomed cottages built of brick and chalk with pantiled roofs. George Noble remembered them as being for elderly people .. 'and do you know, inside there was only one living room, very small, and they had a stepladder to go to bed, through the manhole [trapdoor], you know, then there was a beam across the top, and if they were in bed and got up they almost could catch their head on this beam … They thatched 'em, did Vesteys, it was always Barrack Row when Lady Nunburnholme had them.'
From Barrack Row to Thatched Cottages. The terrace was heightened and thatched by the Vestey family soon after they bought the estate in 1929. It is one of the most photographed views in East Yorkshire.
