Heading down from the Broad Street and Gladstone Road roundabout, then down the good old Dockview Road, you come eventually to the turning left for Kingsland Cresent, keep following the road, then suddenly you come to a dead end.
This wasn’t always the case, this once lead to a terraced Travis Street in 1898, eventually coming out onto an equally terraced Thompson Street.
How things have changed.
Travis Street was completely demolished; along with Queret Street and replaced with council housing we see there today.
What’s more, the two semi-detached houses in our image – numbers 77 and 79, now at the end of Kingsland Crescent, close to where Travis Street once started – were part of a row of similar houses.
Six houses, 81 to 91 Kingsland Cresent have long since been demolished.
John Anzevino, of the Facebook page Barry and District Museumeers, has found a nugget of true magic for us.
The answer to why Kingsland Cresent is the shape it is, straight from Dockview Road, then it bends around to the West to the once Travis Street, is because it follows ancient field boundaries as recorded by the Ordnance Survey in 1877.
The lower end of Kingsland Cresent that meets Dockview Road, partially follows a linear former hedgerow.
That then curves to the right, meaning Kingsland Cresent doesn’t follow it anymore. Then the same field boundary turns back to the left, forming a curve that takes us all along the end of Kingsland Cresent and the former Travis Street.
The buildings 77 to 91 were all terraced; 8 in all were constructed around 1890.
We have some great source information thanks to ‘John’, for in the Barry Dock News of November 22, 1889, reported the sale of 71 building plots along the then planned Kingsland Cresent to the Kingsland Cresent Building Company.
The detail of who lived at numbers 77 and 79 in 1890 has not yet be ascertained but, other structures at Kingsland Cresent do have detailed history that we will examine again.
The form of our two houses is exquisite in their simplicity.
Utilising locally quarried Lias Limestone; particularly from the then recently blown up Castleland Point, when building started in late 1889.
The buildings were all gable two storey on the right-hand paring of the properties, and one storey to the left hand, this repeated throughout the once eight house terrace.
All framework for the doorways, bay windows, first and second floor mullions, are detailed in bathstone.
And with two false limestone arches on the gable frontage of the two houses. Three bands of bathstone string courses, and the quoin stones are also in the same stone. No expense spared on these houses then!
Of an interesting nature and a final point, this row or houses always looked out onto a stretch of never built on grassland.
