X15 BRA c 1875 DIX

Bradford Street Improvements: Irving v Corporation

Size: 17” * 22”

Material: Paper

Date: c.1875

Scale: 10’ to 1”

Condition: Good

This item is marked ‘plaintiff’s plan’. Presumably Bradford Corporation wishes to demolish some property as part of street improvements. They would naturally offer compensation which one of the owners feels might feel was inadequate. The owner of the Dusty Miller Inn is a likely litigant. So, where are we? At the junction of Westgate and Southgate clearly, which this second map shows. Here Westgate is the straight N-S roadway.

Westgate still exists of course. With the limited resources available to me at present I am sure that Southgate had vanished by the time of the 1900 city map and I assume that it disappeared during the development in this area resulting from the creation of Sunbridge Road and Grattan Road. I imagine it approximated to the position of the present Providence Road.

I’m the first to admit that I feel lost deprived of the Local Studies Library collection of Bradford Trade Directories. There are on-line examples of course but I find these difficult to use. Searching the local press is made more arduous because of other inns which used the same name. In the couple of hour’s research I allowed myself I am reasonably sure that the Dusty Miller Inn didn’t exist in the 1850s (1850 Ibbetson directory and Lunds 1856 directory). I have found two references to it in the 1870s and on this basis I have given the plan a date of c.1875. In 1874 one Hannah Redfearn appeared before the magistrates at a Brewster Session, and in 1876 the Dusty Miller Inn was recorded in the Post Office Directory at, 4 Southgate. The name associated with it then was G. Metcalfe.

In the 1871 census William & Hannah Redfearn were ‘beer-sellers’ of Southgate although the name of their inn is not recorded. They must have been reasonably well to do as they had two domestic servants to look after them and their four children. In the same house, or perhaps next door, live another beer-seller, Joshua East, and also a waiter and waitress who I assume were employed at the inn. At least one other inn existed in Southgate called the Duchess of Kent. By the time of the 1881 census Hannah is a widow and retired innkeeper living with her son in Bowling. Presumably G. Metcalfe took over the Dusty Miller. None of this helps with the identification of Mr Irving who I assume owns, rather than operates the property. I can’t find the case in the Bradford Observer but this may simply mean that accommodation was reached and it never reached a public tribunal of any type.