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Just south of Eaton Socon in Cambridgeshire, a large hotel, shops, fast-food restaurants, and warehouses cluster alongside the Great North Road. Long before these diverse businesses appeared, there was a hamlet called Little End. On the site of what is now a supermarket, Pre-Construct Archaeology (PCA) excavated the remains of a row of 19th-century farm labourers’ cottages. Thanks to a wealth of detailed local history research collated by Sue Jarrett and the Eatons Community Association, this offered a rare opportunity to compare material and written evidence for the same site. This work has opened an intriguing window on the lives of working-class people in a small rural community during the reign of Queen Victoria and the first half of the 20th century.
What is known of Little End’s beginnings? On the 1799 Inclosure Map, the hamlet is depicted as a small group of ten properties, including a public house called The Bell. In the 18th century, this was a popular resting point for travellers heading north from London, with up to 20 stagecoaches passing through Little End every day. The settlement flourished. By the mid-19th century, it had extended along the west side of the Great North Road, with a pub at each end, and the 1861 Census records 142 people, many of whom worked on local farms, living in 30 households. However, this growth was short-lived. Just 50 years later, following the demolition of several cottages, the community had contracted to 45 people (including 4 visitors) in 12 properties, and further decline resulted from the widening and straightening of the Great North Road in the 1950s.
The hamlet’s rise and fall reflect changing national trends in farming, with an initial growth in demand for agricultural labour followed by increased mechanisation and importing of food from abroad. Today, only two of the settlement’s original buildings remain. One is The Crown, a 17th-century timber-framed inn, first licensed in 1816, which is still in business, although it was separated from the rest of the hamlet by the construction of the A1 in 1971. The other is The Bell Public House, an 18th-century red-brick building listed under William Fowler the Elder on the Inclosure Award. It was sold to John Hill Day, a brewer, in 1814, then had a change of purpose when it became ‘Bell Farm’ in c.1840. At around this time, another pub called The Bell was built further north along the main road, although this was unfortunately demolished in 2008 to make way for a fast-food restaurant. As PCA’s excavations would reveal, however, further echoes of this long-vanished community lay preserved beneath the ground.
Reconstructing Little End’s cottages
In the north-east of the excavation, the remains of six post-medieval structures were brought to light once more. The oldest of these (Building 1) was built in the 17th or 18th century and may have been a farmstead or a roadside inn. It is not shown on the Inclosure Map, but from its surviving remains we can see that it had an L-shaped ground plan measuring c.12m by c.7m (39ft by 23ft) at its greatest extent. The structure appears to have been built with care and skill, with a foundation trench lined with large, roughly hewn stones, over which the surface was levelled with pea grit gravel and then topped with dwarf mortar-bonded limestone walls. These probably supported a timber-framed structure.
Building 1’s date is based on 17th- and 18th-century finds including a cast copper-alloy hand bell, a bone button, a hook-and-eye fastener, a slate pencil, a thimble, fragments of clay pipes, and part of an olive-green wine bottle. Sherds of 18th- to 19th-century pearlware with transfer-printed decoration and several fragments of 16th- to 17th-century pottery were also recovered. While some of these items may simply have been lost or discarded in the general area, they most likely suggest that Building 1 was built well before Inclosure; it could already have been a ruin by the late 18th century, which would explain its absence from the 1799 map.
The use of stone in Building 1’s foundations is interesting because bricks would have been more readily available and significantly cheaper in this stone-poor area, where quarried stone was generally only used for ecclesiastical or higher-status structures. Indeed, brick was the material of choice when new foundations were superimposed over the originals to create Building 2, most likely between 1799 and 1829. This new structure stood on the same alignment as its predecessor but had a slightly extended floor area, some of the surface of which had survived to be recorded: bricks in the north-east room and red tiles in the smaller north-west room. As similar flooring was not seen in the other buildings, they probably used wooden planks which have since rotted away. A farthing of George III (r.1760-1820), found in the tiled area, may have been used as a gaming counter in the 19th century. Nearby, PCA also recovered a fragment of a mid-19th- to 20th-century glass jug with embossed decoration and a scalloped rim, as well as pieces of a press-moulded dish with a daisy-type flower in relief on the base.
Annie collected and returned washing in a wooden cart, and apparently took snuff, while Jenny did her ironing in the front room.
Building 2’s cheap construction – a single skin of bricks, many of which were reused and/or broken – reflects the lower social status of its inhabitants, something that is also shown by contemporary census records. From these we can tell that the building was owned by P Hodgin and was initially divided into four small dwellings occupied by J Murfin, E Smith, G Bailey, and E Wadsworth. By 1841, however, it had become more crowded, housing four families, including Ann Yerrell (a 40-year-old pauper) and her six children; 65- year-old William Horks, Elizabeth Beard, aged 35, and baby Elizabeth; and Eden Wadsworth and William Pratt (both agricultural labourers) and their families. Occupants in the 1850s and 1860s included a number of farming families, a Chelsea Pensioner, and a sawyer. By the 1870s, one cottage may have served as a grocery shop run by Henry Smith.
By 1881, the census attests that Building 2 had been divided into two cottages, with No. 29 fronting onto the Great North Road and No. 27 facing south towards Bell Farm. Over the next few decades, residents included William Barker (a farm labourer) and his wife Elizabeth (a lacemaker); a needlewoman; and several agricultural labourers. Market gardener Thomas Watts had moved into one of the cottages by 1901, together with his wife, daughters, and a lodger: 16-year-old John Surshaw, an Assistant Postal Telegraph Carpenter. Further insights into the later history of these properties come from Sue Jarrett’s interview with Christine Pearson, a local resident born in 1940, whose family lived at No. 27 from 1936 until around 1955, when both cottages were demolished prior to the widening of the road (even though the building had been condemned in 1939). Christine was also able to draw from memory a plan of both her family home and the neighbouring property, 31 Great North Road, providing valuable information that was not detectable through excavation.
Colourful characters
No. 31 also featured in PCA’s investigations, where it was recorded as Building 3. This was a brick-built, detached property with a slate roof and an adjoining cobbled courtyard. It was probably constructed in the 1840s and was approximately 6m2 (65 sq ft) in plan with four unequal rooms. As its footprint is larger than that of the other cottages, it may have been a shop – and, indeed, Sarah Newcomb and her sister Susannah Cook, both widowed shopkeepers, aged 63 and 51 respectively, lived there by 1851. A decade later, John Beard (a 52-year-old agricultural labourer) and his family are listed there on the 1861 Census, while a widow called Elizabeth Baker and her son, Alfred, also an agricultural labourer, were in residence by 1891. The cottage would continue to be associated with this last family for more than half a century; Alfred’s wife, Annie, and her sister, Sarah J Waterfall (known as Jenny), both laundresses, lived there from around 1901 until 1956 when, according to Mick Clarke (who, together with his parents, was the last to live at No. 29), they both went into an old people’s home in Bedford, and the house was demolished soon afterwards.
Further recollections from local residents indicated that Annie and Jenny were memorable characters who worked well into old age. Annie collected and returned washing in a wooden cart, and apparently took snuff, while Jenny did her ironing in the front room. Pleasingly, possible archaeological echoes of their activities were identified by PCA: a lathe stone integrated into the cobbled surface behind the cottage may have provided a hole for a washing line post, while three buttons (two circular examples made of white and ivory-coloured resin, each with two attachment holes, and another made of copper alloy) and the remains of a wooden dolly peg found in the same area also provide tangible evidence for the sisters’ laundry business. The yard also produced the base of a Victorian cylindrical pharmaceutical phial.
Close by, PCA excavated the remains of Building 4, also constructed in the 1840s, which was subdivided into Nos. 20, 21, and 22 Little End. Like its neighbours, this was a frugal structure, with little ground preparation, shallow footings, and walls formed from a single skin of bricks. Historical records show that each cottage had a kitchen and living room downstairs, with two bedrooms upstairs. These cottages were demolished in the 1930s, but census records tell us that their early occupants included Charlotte Silk (a widowed lacemaker) and her children; Anne Prudence and her granddaughter; and a dressmaker called Mary Holyoak, all of whom lived there in 1851. For the rest of the 19th century, though, most of the residents were farm labourers and their families, including William Nightingale, William Gardner, Joseph Foot, and George Ratcliffe. Charles Luff was listed as an agricultural labourer in 1891 and a cattleman by 1901. At the turn of the century, some of the people who called the cottages home were listed as market gardeners, and residents in the 1920s included the Foot family, Emma Pestell, and William Lovitt. Alfred and Ethel Pearson (Christine’s parents) lived there from 1933 to 1936 before moving to 27 Great North Road.
Two other structures that were uncovered during the excavations were not dwellings, but would have been invaluable to the cottages’ inhabitants. Building 5, which stood behind the roadside properties and had a drainage system and a brick floor, was probably an outside toilet, while nearby Building 6 is likely to have been used for storage or as a workspace. Two brick-lined wells shown on the 1882 Ordnance Survey map were also excavated; one within the courtyard at the rear of No. 31, and the other set further back from the road frontage.
Tasteful finds
As well as investigating the community’s living spaces, PCA recovered a total of 34 19th- and early 20th-century glass bottles, 24 of which are intact, providing a fascinating insight into the products used and consumed by the inhabitants of Little End. They include mineral water bottles embossed with the name ‘Jordan & Addington St Neots’, blue-green ink bottles, pharmaceutical bottles with measure marks, and meat-paste pots. An intact green soda bottle with screw thread and rubber stopper is embossed with the words ‘Marshall Bros Huntingdon’ and a stag’s head. Three blue-green tinted bottles came from the Eagle Brewery on the Great North Road, when it was owned by James Joseph Barry between c.1904 and 1914. There were also products from the wider region, and from even further afield. As well as bottles for Paterson and Sons Ltd Camp Coffee (based in Glasgow) and George Foster Clark’s fruit juice drink powder, the team also found beer bottles embossed with ‘Newland and Nash Ltd Bedford’ and ‘Hinsby St Neots’. Seven more bottles were for sauces, including tomato sauce advertised by Frank Booth Ltd of Dudley, Garton’s HP Sauce, and Daddies Sauce – the latter were probably manufactured by the Albion Bottle Company in Worcestershire, which operated from 1928 until 1978. Many of these objects must have passed through The Bell, The Crown, or Henry Smith’s grocery shop before they were eventually discarded close to the cottages.
Fragments of at least 286 pottery vessels, mostly manufactured in the 19th or early 20th century, were also recovered. Most come from plates, bowls, saucers, and jars (including a James Keiller and Son’s Marmalade jar, which helpfully mentions an 1862 exhibition award), but they also include a tureen, porringer, teapots, mixing bowls, a tankard, remnants of a vase, a candlestick saucer, and four chamber pots. Only 1% of the pottery was imported, with factory-made twice-fired earthenwares from north Staffordshire and other major British pottery production centres forming the majority of the assemblage. Most of the ceramics are refined whiteware, and many feature transfer-printed designs such as ‘Willow pattern’. No full sets of pottery were found, and some were clearly ‘seconds’, due to their mismatched prints. This, alongside the presence of painted, industrial slip or sponge designs, which were typically marketed towards less wealthy people, corresponds with what we know about the local population from written sources.
As a group, the Little End cottages provide good examples of the low-status housing that was common in the 19th century. Due to their relative modernity, remains from this period are sometimes subject to ambivalence or even neglect, so it is unsurprising that such structures, especially in rural areas, are poorly represented within the archaeological record. Many grand buildings survive, but smaller dwellings were not as well built. Their low-impact construction, using readily reusable materials, means that many structures of similar status have not left an archaeological footprint, so it was important to investigate and document the surviving remains at Little End. This excavation has provided a valuable and fascinating glimpse into the lives of a 19th- and early 20th-century rural community, undoubtedly unique in some respects but also representative of thousands of similar farming hamlets across lowland England, many of which have shrunk or disappeared entirely, subsumed – as here – by urban growth. Active local interest and a backdrop of detailed local history research have helped to achieve far greater illumination of the past than would have been possible with only the archaeological record, bringing a long-vanished settlement to vivid life once more.
Further information: This is a summary of a fuller report: Jonathan House, Sue Jarrett, and Isobel Woolhouse (2024) ‘The Hamlet of Little End, East Socon: archaeology and social history’, Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society (PCAS), Volume CXIII: 149-166. https://doi.org/10.5284/1126032
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