IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Southernhay East, EXETER, EX1 1AF

Looking up Southernhay from the junction with Magdalen Street. This part of the hotel buildings also appears in Image

A view across Southernhay of Image

According to Image (taken looking into the angle of the building around the corner), the hotel was built in 1992, but this wall is clearly late C18 or thereabouts. So the demolition of the coachworks that used to be on this site must have spared some of the previous fabric.

Built in 1935 beside the Royal Devon and Exeter Hospital is the old Outpatients building. As with its neighbour, it closed and is now available to new occupants and uses.

This confusion of buildings is part of the NHS site dominated by Dean Clarke House. The buildings at rear left are part of Cecil Boyall House, which fronts Southernhay. At right front is the Victory Wing, facing Magdalen Street, across which the photo was taken.

The plaque in the pediment reads, 'This House was Presented as Habitations for four poor Women and also Endowed by MR JOHN PALMER of this city Anno 1487.' The lower plaque is badly eroded but appears to read, 'Restored by Nathaniel Rogers M.D.', the rest being illegible. In between, on the coping stones, is carved 'Repaired by the CHAMBER Anno 1759'. The building behind the wall appears much more modern than any of this.

A mix of C18 houses beside the junction with Southernhay, and facing a car park that forms part of an elaborate and busy roundabout system.

This stone plaque remains to remind us of the philanthropy of an Exeter baker. In the book: "Exeter, 1540-1640: the growth of an English county town" - By Wallace T. MacCaffrey the following explanation can be found: "At the close of the (fifteenth) century a baker of the city, John Palmer, built houses outside the South Gate for four poor women, with yearly pensions of 6s 8d each, and enfeoffed the endowment lands to the city." How commendable. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VuBMbEAVN7EC&pg=PA103&lpg=PA103&dq=palmer+endowment+exeter&source=bl&ots=4SJ0tx4AZQ&sig=Rf51X9DQ6wjlEaoJy1_tR-Jy6hw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=o-UaT7LSEYySOujf4bML&sqi=2&ved=0CE4Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=palmer%20endowment%20exeter&f=false One wonders why our current industry Titans of Tesco, Sainsbury, Waitrose and Morrisons do not follow this example? One baker in Exeter can build a few houses for the poor, but our paragons of the retail trade haggle over putting in the odd slip road or extra parking for the Local Authority as it might take a few hundred thousand off the tens or hundreds of millions of annual profit.

This hotel opened in 1992 as the Forte Crest. It is at the southern end of Southernhay, close to the site of the South Gate of the city, which was demolished in 1819. Taken from in front of Image