Life on the Brink

I was lucky enough to spend my weekend at 14 North Brink, Wisbech, the National Trust’s newest holiday cottage in the East of England region.

View from a bedroom, 14 North Brink

Entrance Hall, 14 North Brink

14 North Brink is located directly on one of the most important streets in the centre of Wisbech. It faces onto the river Nene, the town’s main trading channel to the Wash, and is the next door neighbour to Peckover House.

North Brink street view: Peckover House and 14 North Brink (from 19 North Brink)

Known as Wainman House, 14 North Brink was built in the 1720s for a wealthy merchant.  The project to conserve the property has involved extensive research, to ensure that the property reflects the later Georgian period when the house was in its heyday.

Dining Room, 14 North Brink

The dining room and drawing room are exceptionally well presented, making this experience a little like using a National Trust house for real. That, along with all the modern comforts that we expect today, make this a splendid proposition for a holiday cottage.

 

Bedroom, 14 North Brink

Wisbech is also well worth visiting. It happened to be the Rose Fair on the weekend we stayed, which meant that the town was buzzing with visitors to the decorated church.

 

Garden of Peckover House (next door to 14 North Brink)

I enjoyed finding out about the many ‘free thinkers’ and radicals that Wisbech has produced over the years. These include most notably the co-founder of the National Trust Octavia Hill, whose birthplace (now a great museum devoted to her life and work) can be seen from 14 North Brink, over the river.

 

Octavia Hill's Birthplace House, from 14 North Brink

As well as Octavia Hill, other progressive and free-thinking products of Wisbech included Thomas and John Clarkson, brothers who campaigned against slavery and the slave trade; William Godwin, the writer and novelist, who married Mary Wollstonecraft and was Mary Shelley’s father; and William Hazlitt, Unitarian minister and father of the essayist.

 

Statue outside Peckover's School room, 19 North Brink

In its day Wisbech was a thriving port and trading centre, and so many opinions must have flowed in and out with the tides on the Ouse (the Ouse later silted, and the Nene was diverted to provide Wisbech with its current channel to the sea). But why might this market town have produced such a tradition of radical and dissenting thinkers and activists?

 

Garden, Peckover House

Harry Jones, author of ‘Free-Thinkers and Trouble-Makers: Fenland Dissenters’ puts it down to the lack of central authority (being so far from London or any other cities), the independence of approach required in such a physically demanding environment (where floods and harsh winters were a fact of life) and the absence of landed gentry choosing to live in the area.

 

Drawing room, 14 North Brink

Whatever the reason, Wisbech has a fine tradition of free thinking, writing and action, personified in the story of Octavia Hill and her reformist parents James Hill and Caroline Southwood Smith.

 

Detail from newly commissioned carpets, 14 North Brink

The commitment to writing and education can be seen in the fine Library of the town’s museum, itself an expression of mid-19^th century civic pride, identity and confidence. There, I saw the manuscript copy of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the story of a young boy (Pip) born in fairly bleak agricultural surroundings (the Kent marshes rather than the Fens), who falls into good fortune through the actions of a mysterious benefactor.  The story may well have appealed to many in Wisbech when it was first published!

As a treasured volume, it is surely only rivalled in Wisbech by the book that sits in the Library at Peckover house – a 900 year old copy of the  Parva Catechesis of Theodore Studites (759-826), transcribed in northern Greece in around 1100. This must surely be one of the oldest books in the National Trust’s collection, if not in any collection in the UK; it is a rare surviving fragment of the Library collection of Lord Peckover, sadly now dispersed. 

900 year old book at Peckover House