BRIGHT and shiny as a new pin in the summer sunshine, Worcester’s new history centre and library at the Hive development at the bottom of The Butts is certainly a testament to 21st century construction. It is also a world away from what used to stand there.

Because lining one side of the site, on a thoroughfare once called Croft Walk, were nine almshouses.

A gift to the city by the charity set up by a wealthy clothier and former city MP and alderman John Nash. He was born in the 16th century and died in the 17th but left a legacy that far outlasted his own lifetime. One of his beneficial gestures was to provide almshouses for the elderly and several groups were built around the city.

Those in Croft Walk, sandwiched between the cattle market and Worcester Royal Infirmary, were erected in the 1850s and lived in right up until the 1970s. However, by 1974, only three of the nine were still occupied and all of them were demolished in 1975.

Today, quite possibly, they would be saved and renovated and converted into bijou town houses within easy walking distance of the city centre with BMWs and Audis parked outside.

However times were different back in the 1970s. Very different.

As Barrie Smith remembers well.

Today, aged 74, he lives in Evesham, but in the late 1930s his family lived in Selly Oak, Birmingham, and every so often they would pile into his father’s Standard Flying Nine and drive down to Worcester to visit his grandparents Ann and Alfred Waldron, who lived in the Croft Walk almshouses. Barrie said: “They lived in the next-to-last plot nearest the river from 1938 until 1949, which would make the number of their home either two or eight.

“As you went in, the kitchen was on the left and there was an open fireplace with a black leaded oven next to it. There was only one cold water tap in the house. The sitting room was on the right and it had a chaise longue.

“I remember they had a radio and there was a sideboard with two white figures of dogs on it. Upstairs was one bedroom but I only went up there once, to see my grandfather. I never slept overnight.

“The lavatories were outside in a block at the top end of the almshouses but I can’t remember how many there were. I don’t recall either, any sign of washing facilities. If they had a tin bath I couldn’t see where they would have kept it because I never saw one and the house was only very small. It had no back door. You just went in from the front.”

During the 1947 flood, the highest the river Severn has ever risen in Worcester, the occupants of the almshouses had to make a hasty exit over the wall at the rear into the corporation yard next door.

Barrie said: “They put up ladders for them to get over the wall but that couldn’t have been easy because most of them were quite elderly people.”

At the front of his grandparents’ house was a pavement and a path of blue engineering bricks. Close by was the cattle market and one of Barrie’s abiding memories was the smell from the market and the slaughterhouse, which was on the same site and actually nearer the almshouses than the stock pens.

Barrie’s grandfather, Alfred Waldron, was a boatman on the Severn and he ran a family coal business with three barges and a yard that faced on to the corporation yard.

When the young lad visited his grandparents, he used to go off fishing with his father across Pitchcroft by the grandstand.

He said: “When they had the races on, I remember seeing Gordon Richards there and his brother Cliff, who was also a jockey, but not so famous.”

Alfred and Ann Waldron had been married at St Andrew’s Church, Deansway – of which the spire alone remains today – on Boxing Day in 1886. They left the Croft Walk almshouses in 1949 due to failing health and two years later Alfred died in hospital in Birmingham.

In more recent years, the register of electors details the names of the occupants of the almshouses and in 1968-69, the last year of near full occupancy, the list reads: 1 Frederick A Glazzard; 2 Albert and Elizabeth Philpotts; 3 Elizabeth Bowers; 4 Francis and Louisa Grove; 5 Esther Phillips; 6 no-one named; 7 Amy Spencer; 8 Minnie Roach; 9 Ernest and Catherine Caterer.

By 1973-74, the year before demolition, there was only Leslie Mace at number 6, George Holmes at number 8 and Alfred Matthews at number 9. Today only the ghosts of times past remain to remind us of black leaded ovens, outside lavatories and one upstairs bedroom.