Two Hidden Houses

When you walk up Rectory Gardens towards St. Mary's Church from Henbury Road you may admire the fine stone walls but you will be hard put to catch even a glimpse of the two historic houses behind them.

The older of the two became the home of Woodstock School (50 pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties) in 2000 when £1M was spent on refurbishment and restoration. John Sampson from nearby Charlton* completed the house very much as it is today in 1688 and his descendants lived there until 1947 when Major Sampson-Way** died. Death duties and compulsory purchase orders for the Norton and Westmoreland farms resulted in the housing estates along Crow Lane and Station Road. The house was known originally as Henbury Awdelett but later generations preferred Henbury Manor. Around 1950 Bristol City Council purchased the house and it became a school and towards the end of the century it catered for children with physical difficulties.

The other house, the former Vicarage, has a less authenticated completion date of 1729. It certainly replaces a large rambling building shown in a print Thomas Kip dated 1710. This latter would probably have been timber framed and indeed there is a very large redundant wooden stanchion embedded in the cellars of the current house. John Gardiner was the first vicar to live in the house and he did so for 50 years. In 1830 the first of three generations of vicars of the Way family followed on from Walter Trevelyan, a famed naturalist (Trevelyan Walk named in his memory?). The first vicar Way, John Hugh**, constructed the tunnel leading from the churchyard towards the Royals and Blaise. He did this with the help of gifts from family and friends so that his parishioners would not have to walk past the vicarage windows as they used the right of way through the vicarage grounds.

When the third vicar, Charles Parry Way, retired in 1927 the house was bought by Dr. Kenneth Wills, a medical doctor. Dr. Wills was an early experimenter with X rays as evidenced by a local electrician who was frequently called out to restore the overloaded electricity supply. He lived in the Old Vicarage until the late 1960s when it became the home of the Drs. John and Elizabeth Spencer-Smith with surgeries in Henleaze and Westbury. In 1974 the new owner set about dividing the house and garden into four units. Today these four have been consolidated into two halves of the house each with a separate owner.

* Demolished in the 1940s to make way for the Filton runway
** John Hugh Way had a sister who married Edward Sampson. Hence the change to Sampson-Way.