Gates
– Temptation and Scotts Brasserie
70 Carr Street is a corner address with Upper Orwell Street which was
once home to the faux
half-timbered public house The Beehive which opened in 1899; it closed
and was demolished in 1960. The unappealing replacement building has
been:
1962-68 Elmo supermarket,
1968-1970 Fine Fare supermarket,
1971 vacant (?),
1972 House of Holland,
in the 1980s, a furniture shop (remember Cane Chain? –
scroll down for a photograph),
in the 1990s, a bar/comedy club (Café Rouge),
and several incarnations (and closures) of the
Chinese buffet restaurant. However, in 2014 it hadn't
been
called 'Temptation' for quite a while, so Tim Leggett sent this
photograph of the out-of-date, but rather impressive lettered gates:
'TEMPT ... ATION',
festooned with cobwebs in the spring sunshine.
2014 image courtesy Tim Leggett
The area would have been much more built up in the 1960s with
the thin strip of land opposite the Beehive site between St Helens
Street and Old Foundry Road crammed
with buildings. A photographer's premises stood across from The Beehive
in a white deco building later occupied by radio and television shop
Avis Cook (later to move to Tacket Street, opposite the Price lettering
– see our Lower Brook Street page for
photographs). This
strip of land was cleared, apart from the public toilets which remained
until the 1990s; they were replaced by a circular building with the
'Major' sculpture on its roof.
The Beehive: a pity it was
demolished
This probably qualifies as the part of "Majors Corner", although
the tenement bought by a dyer called Joshua Major in 1656 actually
stood
on the site now occupied by the redundant Odeon building, between St
Helens Street and Woodbridge Road. The Major family are
recorded in St Margaret's parish registers from 1586 onwards. That site
was, for many years, occupied by Botwood and Egerton's motor garage – later Mann
Egerton's. Its building necessitated the demolition of Major's house in
1923. Fortunately for Ipswich the timber-framed
building was saved and most of the structure was rebuilt as an
extension wing at the rear of Christchurch
Mansion (see that page for interior photographs and information).
The very dark,
creaky, wood-panelled rooms are the interior of Major's House.
1990
image
Above: a photograph from David Kindred's excellent book Ipswich: the changing face of the town
(Old Pond, 2011) showing how the sharp right-angle and narrow pavements
of the Beehive photograph were replaced by an angled 'modernist' shop
with wider paving. In 1990 the furniture shop 'Cain Chain' had estate
agent's boards on display so presumably they closed shortly after this.
'Scott's Brasserie'
2013
images
Well, once again, it's not been Scott's Brasserie for a long time (once
the Vanilla Pod, then The Townhouse) but it's nice that the initials
have been left on the gates to the left of the front entrance. There
are people who remember this building when it was more barn-like (you
had to climb up a ladder to one section) when it was the workshop
producing Coppercraft moulded, spray-painted elephants on those
polished copper sheet backgrounds. Their shop was next to Woolworths in
Carr Street. At the time of writing, early 2015, this restaurant was
called The Townhouse at 4a Orwell Place and had recently reopened
after months of closure
following a kitchen fire.
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