The shops at Cherry Tree hide a long story. They look like a row of bog-standard boring northern terraced shops, don't they? Go on, you don't have to be polite.
The front have been made over, again and again. But as the late, great Professor Mick Aston would say...look round the back at at the top. You start to see the full story.
Start at the top. See those huge broad chimney stacks?
Count the chimney pots. OK, they have been knocked about and altered. There would have been originally 6 chimney pots on each side of that stack - that's apparently six chimney pots for each house. That means six hearths in each house - toasty warm eh?
But hold on. When you look back at how these shops and homes were built, in the middle part of the 1800s, you quickly realise they were built as 'back-to back houses'. So basiclly, no back door, and a dividing wall down the apex of that long shared roof separated the 'front' properties from the 'back' properties.
These buidings therefore had one room at ground floor level, and one room upstairs. And three fireplaces? how did that work?
Ah, well, there wee cellars. So a fireplace in the cellar, a fireplace in the ground floor room, and a fireplace upstairs.
The pavement surfaces have been raised over the 150 years since, so many of these cellars are now hard to spot. See the glazed grating in the photo above?
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