A Brief History of Southernhay

For me, Southernhay easily vies with the Cathedral Close as the most beautiful and visually satisfying part of Exeter still in existence. Despite the fact that much of it was damaged by fire in 1942 and then subsequently demolished, the setting, with its mature trees surrounded by the most lovely red-brick Georgian housing exudes an atmosphere of easy contentment that is unrivalled anywhere else in the city or anywhere else in Devon or Cornwall.

One can only imagine the impression it made before the war, when all the terraces were intact. But even now, in the summer, the red-brick townhouses, with their white window frames and fanlights look stunning when seen against a deep blue sky, framed by towering evergreen English oaks. Walking through Southernhay on a quiet Sunday afternoon really is like stepping back into another world. However the area has a very long and not always so idyllic history.

An archaeological excavation in 2002 discovered the remains of an Iron Age farmstead in the area consisting of a roundhouse enclosed by a circular ditch, with pottery shards dating from c250 BC. The settlement appears to have been abandoned by the time the Second Augustan Roman Legion arrived at Exeter cAD53. Since the construction of the mighty defensive walls of the Roman city c180 AD Southernhay has lain directly outside the city limits, spread out between the East Gate and the South Gate.

The area of modern-day Southernhay is highlighted in red on the 1587 map of Exeter by Braun and Hogenberg right, bounded on the east side by the road known as Great Southernhay. (The name itself just means 'the southern field', from the Anglo-Saxon word 'haia' meaning a hedge or enclosure.)

During the Middle Ages the area was known simply as Crulditch. Exeter historian W. G. Hoskins has surmised that the name derives from the medieval word 'crull' meaning 'curly' refering to the curved line of the old defensive ditch as its curved around this side of the city between the two great gates. The flat countryside beyond the South Gate made the city particularly vulnerable to attack and the ditch was constructed to aid the protection of this side of Exeter.

It was upon this piece of land that the annual Lammas Fair was held from at least 1278 until it was moved inside the city to the High Street at the end of the 18th century. And it was here during the reign of Mary I, on 15 November 1557, that the Protestant martyr Agnes Prest was burnt at the stake for denying the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. According to John Hooker, "her own husband and children were her greatest persecutors, from whom she fled, for that they would force her to be present at Mass". Hooker also relates that, in 1571, Agnes Jones was "burnt to death in Southernhay" for poisoning her husband. John Cole's map of 1709 still refers to the western side of Southernhay as the "Burning Place".

The pleasure gardens which had evolved in Southernhay by the middle of the 17th century were all swept aside following the outbreak of the English Civil War. In 1642 huge defensive ditches and ramparts were laid out across the entire area. Much was destroyed during the two Civil War sieges of Exeter and this side of the city was severely damaged, either deliberately or through military offensives.

In 1664 the increase in Exeter's population lead to the creation of the Trinity Green burial ground at the southern end of Southernhay above, now the site of a hotel carpark. The burial ground was excavated in 2008 and amongst the finds uncovered were fragments of Roman, medieval and post-medieval pottery, bits of Roman roof tile and medieval floor tile, 38 skeletons, 17th century clay pipes and a single piece of prehistoric flint.

The next significant development was the establishment in Southernhay East of the Devon and Exeter Hospital in 1741, the brain-child of the Dean of Exeter Cathedral Alured Clarke (the original, highly impressive Georgian building still survives right and today is known as Dean Clarke House).

By the mid-18th century Southernhay was starting to become incorporated into the city centre with only the city wall acting as a great impediment to its expansion. By the end of the 18th century Exeter's reliance on an economy founded on the export of wool was starting to wane. Exeter's wool trade was struck dead by the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and it never recovered but the city was attracting a number of wealthy professionals, members of the gentry and retired Army colonels who came primarily for the city's mild climate and rural location. And they all needed somewhere to live.

The great Georgian housing scheme known first as Bedford Crescent and later as Bedford Circus had already been started in 1773 but it had remained within the boundary of the old city walls. The desire for prestigious, spacious housing near to the city centre applied its own inevitable pressure. According to Hugh Mellor, the land was owned by the Dukes of Bedford, the same family who had once owned Bedford House, and the fifth duke employed a local architect/builder called Matthew Nosworthy in 1789 to build a sequence of townhouses at Southernhay West. (Nosworthy seems to have used the townhouses of Bedford Square in London as his template.) The construction of further properties followed, mostly the work of Nosworthy and William Hooper.

The medieval city wall was breached in two places, forming entrances from the Cathedral Close and from Bedford Circus. From the 1790s until the 1830s, Southernhay was transformed into an exclusive residential area, the beauty of which is still obvious today. (The entrance into the Cathedral Close known as New Cut was originally the site of an a defensive tower and later a postern gate. It was widened in 1750 and received the delicate wrought-iron bridge which spans the route today in 1814.)

Bedford Circus, Dix's Field and two of Nosworthy's magnificent terraces were gutted during World War Two, the remains shamefully demolished by the city council, but when complete Southernhay ranked with any other Georgian townscape in England. The image above shows the extent of Georgian Southernhay as it existed prior to 1942: Bedford Circus (1), Southernhay West (2), Southernhay East (3), Barnfield Crescent (4), Dix's Field (5). The city wall is outlined in yellow. Bedford Circus is easily visible within the boundary first laid down by the Romans in c180AD. From Bedford Circus flowed the later developments of Southernhay West and East, Barnfield Crescent and Dix's Field. All the townhouses coloured in red were damaged as a consequence of World War Two and demolished during the post-war reconstruction. Only the townhouses highlighted in purple survive today and are still one of the glories of the city.

One particular aspect of Southernhay which it is difficult to grasp from the ground today is the pre-war layout of its roads. The central and western sections of the area remained largely unchanged but prior to the post-war reconstruction Southernhay was accessed in the east directly from the High Street. During the post-war rebuilding it was decided to move the entrance from the High Street into Paris Street. Paris Street itself was completely realigned and widened. Where Paris Street now joins Sidwell Street and the High Street was once the entrance into Southernhay. It's probably more easily explained using the image right which combines a map of 1905 with an aerial view of the same area today. The pre-war roads of Southernhay are highlighted in red. The High Street is at the top running left to right. The post-war alignment of Paris Street is highlighted in purple. Paris Street originally converged with Sidwell Street on the other side of the building labelled on the map as 'Hotel' (this was the Old London Inn until it was demolished in the 1930s). The property highlighted in yellow was No. 1 Dix's Field, a particularly lovely Regency house which stood on one side of the entrance into what was probably Nosworthy's most beautiful housing scheme.

It's difficult not to be condemnatory of the many alterations which were made to Exeter's historic street plan after World War Two, let alone the decision not to restore some of the city's most significant buildings. Fortunately, in Southernhay at least, much survives. The eastern end, apart from the two remaining townhouses in Dix's Field, is worthless and what Mellor called 'a neo-Georgian monster' at the opposite end is fairly grotesque. But in between the two are a wide variety of strikingly charming late-Georgian houses (now mostly offices) of particular beauty.

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The Destruction of Bedford Circus

The historian W.G. Hoskins called it "one of the finest pieces of Georgian town-planning in England"; for Sir Albert Robertson it was an "excellent grouping" and "representative of the refinement of the day"; Professor Derek Portman believed it was Exeter's "Georgian minor masterpiece"; Thomas Sharp, the city's post-war town planner, wrote that it was "one of the best examples of unified urban architecture in England: something near perfection of its kind, the quintessence of the 18th century philosophy of town building"; and into the 21st century the destruction of Bedford Circus is often regarded as one of Exeter's biggest architectural losses. The history books often state that it was destroyed during World War Two, but it wasn't. Most of it was fire-damaged during World War Two but it was only actually destroyed completely by the city council in the post-war rebuilding of the city. The decision to remove it was a blatant act of cultural vandalism.

The idea for Bedford Circus started with Robert Stribling, a speculative architect/builder who, in 1773, who began the construction of 14 townhouses on the site of John Russell's Bedford House, itself a remnant of a Dominican Friary which had been on the same location from the 13th century until it was dissolved in 1538 during the Reformation.

The image left is based on Caleb Hedgeland's model of Exeter. The model depicts the city as it was in 1769, prior to the construction of the Circus. Bedford House is highlighted in red. At least one of its three ranges was formerly part of the Dominican Friary. Bampfylde House, on the corner of Catherine Street and Bampfylde Street, is highlighted in green. Chapel Street, also known as Egypt Lane, borders the Cathedral Precinct to the bottom left. The completed Circus, based on the 1905 map of Exeter, is highlighted in purple. It's easy to see how the north-eastern crescent, the first of the houses to be built, was constructed on top of Bedford House. The first stone of Bedford Circus was laid 27 May 1773.

According to Jenkins "in digging for the foundation, great numbers of human bones were dug up, with the foundation of a church, broken mouldings [and] fragments of sepulchral monuments", all left over from the medieval friary. Lead coffins were unearthed and a lead box containing "three or four human skulls, and bones." The lead coffins were salvaged for scrap and the bones, much to Jenkins' disgust, dumped "among the rubbish, to the disgrace of humanity". Stribling's 14 houses took the form of a sweeping crescent, facing south-west towards the cathedral and were originally known as Bedford Crescent. The ground facing the crescent was taken up with stables and other buildings, including Brown's Coach and Harness Manufactory. Tozer's 1793 map of the city clearly shows that the first crescent had been completed by the end of the 18th century.

The photograph right shows one of the beautiful entrances which accompanied each townhouse. Tuscan columns with acanthus leaf capitals stood either side of an arched doorway above which was a scalloped-edged fanlight.

After a hiatus of nearly 50 years preparations began for turning the crescent into an architectural circus. It seems that the creation of a circus had always been part of Stribling's original plan as it was being called Bedford Circus as early as 1803, over 20 years before steps were taken to complete it. A report in Trewman's 'Exeter Flying Post' dated 19 May 1825 states that "active measures are being taken for commencing the new houses on the Bedford estate in this city in order to complete the Circus as originally intended; Mr T. Horrell is the architect and builder; and we understand the Duke of Bedford has, with his usual liberality, satisfied all those who had any claims on the old building which has so long been a great nuisance, and disgraced this part of the city." The ground was still owned by the Dukes of Bedford but the report appears to suggest that remnants of old buildings associated with the sprawling Bedford House estate might still have existed on the site even after the completion of the first phase of the construction in the 1770s.

Nine matching townhouses and an extra-parochial neo-Classical chapel (completed in 1832 and shown left) were eventually built in another crescent facing the one from the 1770s. In 1832 workmen digging a shaft for new sewerage pipes for the later houses discovered a new collection of human bones, including two skulls. When completed the overall effect of the Circus was of a gigantic ellipse, entered from the High Street via Bedford Street, with a small private park situated in the centre filled with mature trees and surrounded by iron railings.
All the houses in Bedford Circus were of a similar type. They were built of locally-fired brick, earthy-red in colour, a white stone string course being used to separate each floor visually. The windows on the third floor of the later houses were slightly different but the architectural details were secondary compared with the overall impression of the whole scheme. The image at the top of this post is a composite of three separate photographs and is an attempt to try and give some indication of the magnificent visual impact of Bedford Circus as entered from the High Street. I'm not aware of any photographs which show the entire arrangement at ground level. Even today, had they survived, a wide-angle lens would've been needed to capture both crescents and the chapel in the same shot.

The photograph below shows Robert Stribling's original crescent of 14 houses from c1773 as seen from the entrance into Southernhay. Careful scrutiny of the first floor of the facades will show the coat of arms of the Russell family, carved in stone and reclaimed from the entrance porch of old Bedford House. Beneath the coat of arms, on the ground floor, can be seen the late-19th century bronze plaque (shown further below) commemorating both the Circus and Bedford House.

As an example of Georgian town-planning Bedford Circus was exceptionally rate and similar set-pieces could only be found in England in such places as 18th century Bath and the Bloomsbury area of London. For me, the most extraordinary aspect of Bedford Circus was that it was situated within the boundaries set by the original Roman city, laid down nearly 1800 years earlier. It wasn't built in a new suburb but was shoe-horned into a small medieval city, obviously designed to be a showpiece and a tour de force of domestic architecture, which it was. Although there were already a number of brick neo-Classical houses in the city by the 1770s (e.g. the Notaries' House in the Cathedral Close and Paragon House in South Street) they were still vastly outnumbered by timber-framed buildings of the preceding centuries. Stylistically, the creation of the Circus was something entirely new in the architectural history of Exeter. The size of its footprint rivalled that of the Cathedral itself. Only the superlative surviving fragments of Georgian architecture in Southernhay provide a hint as to what Bedford Circus was like.

By 1874 "the quiet old Circus" was regarded as one of Exeter's "most characteristic features...admired by everyone who came to the city." As Peter Thomas states in his book 'Aspects of Exeter', "the aesthetic qualities of Bedford Circus were appreciated from the time its first houses were built until its substantial remains were completely removed by the local authority." It seems that the only people who didn't appreciate it where those responsible for its final destruction in the immediate post-war period.

The aerial view right shows the full magnificence of Bedford Circus as it stood in the summer of 1928. Few cities in England could boast of anything comparable.

The end began in the early hours of 04 May 1942 when German bombs set light to much of Exeter's historic centre. The fire from burning buildings in the High Street spread east into Bedford Circus. By the morning many of the townhouses had been gutted by fire with only the walls remaining, although some did survived intact with just broken windows and missing roof slates. In almost any other European country Bedford Circus would've been reinstated and restored to its former state. It would've been too important to lose. Many of the walls remained sound and the task of reconstruction would've been relatively straightforward. Instead, the inexplicable decision was made by the city council to remove the Circus in its entirety. The burnt-out buildings were bulldozed, the few surviving townhouses were demolished, the railings ripped up and the old trees chopped down. Even the outline of the road fronting each crescent was erased during the post-war rebuilding. There is no excuse for what happened as Exeter lost, forever, one of its finest architectural treasures.

The image left © Express & Echo shows the site of the completely destroyed Abbots' Lodge in the foreground with the badly damaged Choristers' School to the left. Highlighted in red in the background is the curving rear elevation of one side of Bedford Circus, with broken windows and damaged roofs, but structurally still intact, proving that parts of the Circus survived and could've been repaired and reconstructed with relatively little difficulty had the city council decided to do so.

It's interesting to speculate exactly why the city council decided to destroy the Circus completely. The evidence suggests that once it was damaged they couldn't get the ruins down fast enough. Thomas Sharp, the town planner behind much of the city's post-war reconstruction wrote in 1946 that: "Bedford Circus has gone. The bombs shattered it to bits. It is so utterly destroyed that a man returning to Exeter can walk over its site without knowing he is doing so". Sharp was either lying through his teeth or he had been completely deceived about exactly what survived the Blitz of 1942 and what didn't. If he had seen the ruins perhaps he would've recommended a faithful reconstruction as he did with the Georgian townhouses of Dix's Field (although, despite this recommendation, the city council destroyed the remains of Dix's Field anyway as well as the facades of the two damaged terraces in Southernhay West).

The council moved swiftly to remove almost all bomb-damaged buildings and it's likely that when Sharp arrived in the city to survey the damage all he saw were the cleared plots rather than the ruins themselves. John Summerson in his 1949 book 'Heavenly Mansions' stated that Bedford Circus had been "utterly destroyed by enemy action", and that myth has remained widely believed up to the present day, but the Blitz of 1942 in no way "shattered it to bits" or "utterly destroyed it". As Gavin Stamp writes in his book 'Britain's Lost Cities', in which Exeter has the dubious accolade of having a chapter dedicated to it: "Photographs taken for the newly established National Buildings Record show that, immediately after the raids, the Georgian facades of Bedford Circus and the damaged parts of Southernhay were still standing: surely they could and should have been shored up and retained?".

The image right shows an aerial view of the city in 2011 overlaid onto which is the 1905 map of Bedford Circus. It give some rough idea where the two crescents were positioned in relation to the recent redevelopment of the area.

So why wasn't Bedford Circus restored? The reasons probably include the economic reality of the times, as well as a more general desire to embrace Modernism, with its deluded promise of a cleaner, better society. One reason was a disinterest towards Georgian architecture in general in the first decades of the 20th century. But surely anothr reason which can't be overlooked is that of sheer, iconoclastic ignorance. The same city council had no qualms about the demolition of dozens of medieval and Tudor townhouses during the slum clearances in the first third of the 20th century. It never seemed to occur to them that Exeter was targeted in 1942 precisely because of buildings like Bedford Circus. It never seemed to occur to them that in clearing away the damaged remains of so many historic buildings they were actually finishing a process that the Germans had already started themselves.

The subsequent decades have shown that in Exeter historic buildings had almost no value whatsoever beyond a merely commercial one. If it was in the way of a new road then it came down. If it was in the way of a new shopping centre then it came down. If it could be replaced with something which provided more retail space then it came down. A building's historical or aesthetic value ranked well down the list of considerations.

Thomas Sharp himself reflected on the fact that the city council's own pre-war guide to the city made absolutely no mention of Exeter's stunning Georgian architecture, despite the fact that A. E. Richardson had singled out the city's Georgian buildings for particular praise in the 1920s. Clearly it simply wasn't seen as being of any importance whatsoever. Exeter's historic architecture has been relentlessly squeezed between the two demands of catering for an increase in traffic and catering to commercial interests. The result was inevitably wholesale demolition in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that involved hundreds and hundreds of buildings, most of them in or around the historic central core of the city. And it wasn't a building here or a building there. It was acres and acres of property, entire streets and districts, totally flattened and redeveloped.

In 1946 Thomas Sharp wrote that Bedford Circus was "so good that many people want it rebuilt as it was, want it restored in the fullest sense". (Even as late as 2004, when the Bedford Circus site was in the process of being redeveloped and decades after the original had been destroyed, letters to the local newspaper were fruitlessly calling for its reconstruction.) But the local authority had no intention of restoring it, let alone rebuilding it from scratch. The remains of the Circus were pulled down, although the chapel walls remained standing up to 1949. In its place Thomas Sharp planned a pedestrianed shopping precinct, allegedly the first of its kind in England, to be known as Princesshay above right. Part of this was to occupy the site of the north-eastern side of Bedford Circus. The rest of the site was taken up with a much-altered Bedford Street, including a row of low shops standing where the south-western crescent and chapel had stood. It was all mind-numblingly mediocre. Bridget Cherry called these post-war shops "depressingly shack-like", adding that it was all "a poor compensation for the loss of the Georgian Bedford Circus."

Between 2005 and 2007, the entire area was demolished again and rebuilt as yet another clone shopping precinct. The improvements are negligible as the new precinct's architecture is as banal as its predecessor. It already looks dated and no doubt in 20 years time it will in turn be demolished and something else built in its place, and so on and so on. The image below shows part of the new Princesshay shopping precinct that now stands on the site of one side of Bedford Circus. Drag the handle with your cursor to see before and after images!

History has judged the council's demolition of Bedford Circus justifiably harshly. W.G. Hoskins, probably Exeter's most significant 20th century historian and one of the founder members of the Exeter Civic Society in 1961, called it an "unforgivable act of vandalism". Peter Thomas states that "to have destroyed it all is unforgivable." According to Todd Gray, a contemporary historian, Bedford Circus was "destroyed partly through the Blitz in 1942 but more due to the indifference of city planners."

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The History of Bedford House

The location of Bedford House must rank as one of the most historically interesting places in the entire city. Once part of the Roman civitas, the site's medieval history begins in the 13th century when a portion of ground within the city walls and just north of the cathedral was granted to the religious order known as the Dominicans, or Black Friars. (The Black Friars are first recorded in Exeter in 1232 although their friary church wasn't dedicated until 1259 by the Bishop of Exeter, Walter Bronescombe.) The area of their new religious precinct was bounded by Chapel Street, Catherine Street and the city walls, and the Black Friars' quickly established a monastic complex on the site that survived for over 300 years before it was dissolved by Henry VIII on 15 September 1538.

On 04 July 1539 the land was granted as a royal gift by the king to John Russell, the 1st Earl of Bedford (shown left in a portrait by Holbein). Born in Dorset, John Russell was a courtier at the Tudor courts of both Henry VIII and his father Henry VII. He was made a privy councillor in 1536 and retained royal favour despite the apparent antipathy between himself and Anne Boleyn. Following the arrest and execution of the Catholic-supporting 1st Marquess of Exeter, Henry Courtenay, in 1538/39, John Russell was well-placed to fill the resulting power vacuum left in Devon and was soon appointed to the role of Lord President of the short-lived Council of the West. He was made Lord High Admiral in 1540 and was one of the executors of Henry VIII's will in 1547. In 1549 he was directly involved in relieving the besieged city of Exeter during the Prayerbook Rebellion. He died in 1555. Soon after taking possession of the friars' land Russell began to convert the remaining monastic buildings, probably consisting of the friars' refectory and dormitory, into a large townhouse.

By the mid-16th century it was, by far, the largest and most prestigious domestic house in Exeter, except perhaps the palace of the Bishop of Exeter. One of the few representations of Bedford House exists on the 1587 map of the city by Braun and Hogenberg, which is shown at the top of this post, although its accuracy is debatable.



Another illustration above © Devon Records Office shows the house c1700 viewed across the great court, then known as Bedford Square, looking towards the main range. Note the carved armorial tablet above the doorway. None of the illustrations of the building are particularly detailed, but fortunately there are two sources which help visualise what the house was like.

The first is the vast, magnificent wooden model of the city constructed by Caleb Hedgeland and completed in 1824. It recalls the city as it was in 1769, before the demolition of the city gates and the demolition of Bedford House itself. The Hedgeland model shows Bedford House in some detail left, highlighted in red. It consisted of a single long range with two projecting wings. A wall enclosed the courtyard and the entrance was probably via the driveway visible disappearing at an angle towards Catherine Street to the right. Many of the other buildings in the vicinity of the house were probably connected with the estate. It was vast, a true mansion, many times larger than Bampfylde House and it would've dwarfed most of the other domestic buildings in the city.

The second source of information is the survey of 1594, taken when the house was temporarily empty and unused, and which provides a good description of the sprawling accommodation. Much of the ground floor of the main range was taken up with the medieval great hall, presumably divided into two by the insertion of a floor. In the hall at ground level was the dining room with a screens passage leading to a buttery, pantry and kitchens. Above the dining room was the great chamber, the Russells' main living room. Other rooms on the first floor included the Russells' bed chambers and a drawing room as well as bedrooms for serving maids, although four bedrooms for the male servants were on the third floor and built into roof space. There were also nursery chambers and an audience chamber.

The fishhouse, washhouse, slaughterhouse and stables were contained in a separate range. There was also an armoury house. It appears as though the buildings were constructed around a central court with the main entrance into the house being though a large porch. The entire property and its extensive gardens were surrounded by a high wall, part of which was the city's own defensive wall, with access through a main gatehouse via Catherine Street with a smaller postern entrance in Freren Lane (later Egypt Lane and then Chapel Street).

Bedford House remained at the centre of Exeter's history throughout the 17th century. In 1644, during the English Civil War, the house was still in the possession of the Bedford family, the then owner being William Russell, the 1st Duke of Bedford and lord-lieutenant of the county of Devonshire. Because it was regarded as a relatively safe pro-Royalist retreat amidst the havoc of the civil war, Charles I sent his wife Henrietta Maria of France to Exeter when she was pregnant with their child.

The Queen lodged at Bedford House and it was here that she gave birth to the king's youngest daughter on 16 June 1644, baptised in the nearby cathedral as Henrietta Anna Stuart right, later Duchess of Orleans and sister-in-law to the French king Louis XIV. Soon after the birth, on the 26 July 1644, Charles I arrived in the city where he lodged with his daughter at Bedford House, the Queen having already left England for the continent. (A portrait of the princess still hangs in the Guildhall. Given to the city in 1671, it was a personal gift from her brother, then King Charles II.)

By the 1740s Bedford House had been sub-divided into three separate tenements, and it was in one of these houses that Exeter's most prominent 18th physician, Thomas Glass, took up residence in 1740. Unfortunately time was running out for Bedford House and in the early 1770s the house was completely demolished. A speculative builder by the name of Robert Stribling drew up building plans for the empty ground that, when completed, would prove to be one of Exeter's most important architectural creations: Bedford Circus.

However, at least one trace of the old Tudor mansion still remained. According to Jenkins, writing in 1806, in the "centre of the [new] buildings is placed an ancient tablet, (taken from the front of the old [Bedford] house) on which is carved, in relief, the armorial bearings of the noble house of Russell, quartered with several coats of arms, supported by two angels". And he was right. Just visible in the photograph of the south-facing crescent of Bedford Circus left is the carved tablet taken from the front of Bedford House, highlighted in red. A memorial plaque was also affixed to one of the Circus's beautiful red-brick townhouses in 1897.

The Circus that stood on the site of Bedford House was completed in the 1830s and it remained unchanged as one of the finest pieces of Georgian townplanning in England until it was partly damaged by fire in the bombing raid of 04 May 1942. The city council swept away the salvageable remains and replaced it with the worst sort of post-war trash, and only the wall plaque (shown below © Simon Harriyott) was salvaged. Apart from the reclaimed plaque, today there is no visible sign that either Bedford House or Bedford Circus ever existed.

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