3 Chapel Road Flitwick

3 Chapel Road September 2017

3 Chapel Road, as its frontage suggests, used to be a shop. The Rating and Valuation Act 1925 specified that every building and piece of land in the country was to be assessed to determine its rateable value. The valuer visiting 3 Chapel Road [DV1/C272/140] found that the property was owned and occupied by butcher Frederick Briden.

The accommodation was as follows: a reception room, a kitchen, a scullery and there were three bedrooms upstairs. The butcher’s shop was a lean-to structure measuring 10 feet 3 inches by 14 feet. There were a number of outbuildings, all built of weather-boarding and corrugated iron, expect the last building with had tiles instead of corrugated iron: a coachhouse or garage; a trap house; an open shed; a hay house; a stable and loose box; a chaffhouse; two pigsties and a slaughterhouse. Briden also owned 5 Chapel Road which he leased to D Odell for 5/8 per week in rent.

Directories for Bedfordshire were not published every year but every few years from the early to mid-19th century until 1940. Frederick Briden appears in Kelly’s Directory for Flitwick from 1910 to 1940.