Harringay, Haringey - So Good they Spelt it Twice!
Cavendish Road Cow Houses
I'm sure that most of you who are local will have at some point walked, cycled or driven up Cavendish Road and noticed the cow heads that adorn the houses on a good part of the northern side of the road.
Digging around after coming across an early Edwardian photo of the shop at the bottom of the road, I've got hold of a the end of a thread that might uncover a bit more about the heads.
The corner shop, no 429, along with the one next door were built by Pryor Brother Builders, run by Thomas and Alfred. They gave their address as Harold House, Cavendish Road. At the top of 431 Green Lanes is a pair of cow heads. Given this link along with their business address in Cavendish Road, it might be a reasonable to assume that it was the Pryors who built the Cavendish cow houses.
Sadly, I can't find any trace of the Pryor brothers other than a record of their dissolving their building partnership in 1891. I think this would have been directly after they'd completed their Harringay building work.
London Gazette April 1891
So I may have a 'who' made the cow houses, but I wonder if there's any 'why'. Did the Pryors simply see the cow decorations at their building supplies store and take a fancy to them? Or is there some reason they chose them, I wonder.
And whilst you're at it, any idea where Harold House was? Was it, I wonder, behind the shops or was one of the cow houses styled as Harold House?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Hugh on
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I'm not sure why there would be a link, Martin.
We know who sold the land, we know what was on it prior to the sale and we know who built it. At the moment none of those link to that dairy, or the dairy on St Ann's Road or any of the other local dairies.
Thomas was born in 1854 and Alfred three years later. Both grew up in Bethnal Green and their father was a bricklayer. Both their paternal grandfather and great grandfather were hairdressers in Spitalfields, no doubt living off the penchant for coiffure of the wealthy French Huguenot silk merchants who moved into the area from the end of the 17th Century along with any number of silk weavers.*
On the other side of the family, their maternal grandmother was widowed at a young age and remarried. So their mother grew up in South London, with her mother, brother (Alfred) and her step-father, a Woodcutter. Their maternal great-grandfather was a labourer in east London.
So I can't see any obvious family link to cows on either side of the family..
By the time he was 16, Thomas was already working as a bricklayer. He was still living with his parents in Bethnal Green, at 3 Wellington Row, and not a cow in sight.
In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I'd say that the Pryor brothers just chose cows from a building supplies pattern book. I'd say they probably made a popular choice. Goodness, we're still talking about them 130 years after the houses were built!
The only other stone I can find for you linked to the Pryors is Thomas' gravestone.
*By the mid-eighteenth century, silk industry in Spitalfield had declined. One has to wonder if this had anything to do with the family shifting their metier to bricklaying.
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Permalink Reply by Martin Malcolm on
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Looks like that's the answer, doesn't it? People find cows attractive and pop them on buildings because they can! But yes, I bet they'd have been delighted to think people would still be wondering about their choices more than a century later!
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Permalink Reply by linka on
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They might even been from an apprentice doing their own pattern research in a local architectural history resource, the Royal Architectural Museum:
https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/caring-for-our-collections/photographs-o...
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What a fantastic resource of images! It makes me wonder how many of them were replicated in London's buildings.
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I must not have checked a couple of years ago, but I can now confirm that Harold House was 65 Cavendish, the most southerly house in Cow-Terrace. Oddly it has no cows! They might have been removed. I noticed that the northern most property in Cow-Terrace is also cowless. Is this black magic?
1892 Kelly's Directory
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Researching another topic on the other side on the railway, I just came across a 1889 report about the Pryors (sic). Apparently they were repeatedly in trouble with the Hornsey Surveyor for using bricks and mortar of a quality so poor the houses were judged to be dangerous. On the first occasion, the Pryors were required to pull the houses down and start again (not that unusual). On another occasion, they had to pull down the offending parts.
if you live in a 'cow house' don't worry: it seems that every house was inspected before it was occupied by an apparenlty very assiduous building inspector.
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