Here are some items found in houses in Gwydir Street. Click on photo for for larger version.
Number 7
Bathroom
Found in garden
Found in shed
Next to Hot Numbers
Found in garden
We moved into our house in 1979 and somehow never got round to replacing the bathroom fittings. The bath taps (and the maze) are recent, but the bath, sink, and sink taps are original (although I don't know how old they are). But we did paint the outside of the bath, to high-light the splendid legs!
More than half our garden is vegetables, so a fair amount of digging has been done in the last 45 years. Here are some of the things that we have found.
There are various pieces of dolls. They are not all the same doll, as the size and style varies. Even the pink bit is part of a doll's face - you can see a bit of eye lashes. I wondered if these dols, being made of china, broke, and the little girls decided to have a funeral, and buried them in the garden!
Another toy
Round objects: The clay balls are probably marbles. The glass balls may be the stopper inside a bottle of fizzy pop.
There is one larger ball, which is broken in two (both sides shown below). I don't know what this is!
Another stopper
Tobacco was smoked in clay pipes. These had long stems, and were very breakable! So bits of pipe stem are quite common. Sometimes you find the bowl. The stem varied in width within a single pipe.
I don't know if the red piece is from a clay pipe. It does have a hole through the middle.
This is an unknown item of brass. I have polished it. The obvious suggestion is that it is a drawer handle, but the screww goes up too far - you wouldn't be able to get your fingers round it! Perhaps just a decoration. Yes, it does look like the Bronze Flower Path on the pavement up Castle Hill, but that dates to 2002, and I can guarantee that this is (a lot) older!
This is a bit worrying - a (fired) bullet! We're in a built-up area, you know... The dimensions suggest that it's a .303 rifle cartridge. These were used by the British Army from 1889 right through to the 1950s. They fitted the Lee-Enfield rifle (which had a similar service life), the Bren machine gun, and Spitfires up to about 1943. One suggestion was that it was a blank cartridge. I hope so!
Someone has lost their key. (It doesn't fit our back door - I tried!)
This looks like a plumbing fitting - possibly something to do with watering the garden.
A pulley?
A padlock
Oyster shell
I have no idea what this is! Pretty, though.
There are a lot of bits of crockery. Old fashioned flower pots had large holes in the bottom, so you needed "crocks" at the bottom before filling with earth.
Marmalade
Blue and white ware, like willow pattern, were popular.
Other decorated pieces
Other pieces, such as rims, handles and a foot.
This brings back memories of a 1950s childhood, with teedy bear decorated plates!
This looks too crude for crockery. Perhaps some architectural decoration.
Metal bits. Two are GPO buttons (see Found in shed). One is, I suspect, a fly button or an underwear button! The last seems to be a stud of some kind. The photos below show both sides of each.
GPO badge (see above)
Cambridhe Coronation medal for Edward VII (1902)
This little bottle used to hold ink. It says Judson on one side, and London on the other. The name "Judson" has the N the wrong way round. Perhaps a mistake in the mould, or even a fake?
This looks like the bottom of a bottle.
Some pieces of clay pipe (two photos of each piece). The bowl is splendid!
Some pieces of crockery (two photos of each piece)
This is a police button:
On 5 November 2022, a group of residents had organised to tidy up the pocket garden next to Hot Numbers and plant out Spring bulbs. As we were digging and clearing weeds, we pulled out a small plastic/resin figurine of a clown on a unicycle with another clown on its back. Unfortunately the head of the clown was broken off but we also found that nearby as well as another small toy of a baby teddy bear climbing up on the back of a mummy teddy bear. We should possibly have taken them back with us but they were quite creepy in the dusk hours and we wanted to leave them behind the tree as a weird Gwydir mascot. Sadly when we were planting bulbs again the following Autumn they were nowhere to be found...
