IMAGES TAKEN NEAR TO
Welland Place, St. Marys Road, MARKET HARBOROUGH, LE16 7GH

I don't know what enquiries they're hoping for but I'd rather see something modern in its place.

A massive collection of interconnected apartment blocks, managed and leased as retirement accommodation.

A pleasing terrace of Victorian housing.

Most pillar boxes are of cast construction but this one is of sheet steel. The plinth and upper body is sheet steel, and so is the door. The posting slot and notice frame are fabricated, and the royal cypher and the lettering Royal Mail are also made of sheet material. The royal cypher appears to be laser cut and applied to a folded box. The cap is made of two formed halves, the joint covered by a strip of punched steel that creates the famous trimmed cap. This is post box LE16 2D. It says so on the notice panel.

The two wooden-clad parts of the Retirement Village are called Chater House and Sence House All of LHA's properties here are named after rivers, with only a superficial local connection. The Chater is part of the Welland Basin, and joins that river at Ketton near Stamford. The Sence is part of the Trent capture, and joins that river as part of the Tame. This collection of buildings, styled a Retirement Community, is built on the site of the former railway line to Rugby closed in the Beeching era, and sadly missed.

One of the blocks of homes that form a "retirement village" in Market Harborough calling itself the Welland Quarter. I really don't know what to think about this sort of thing - at the tail of one's life as mobility fails it is disturbing to me to be dependent upon elevators to access one's home. What if there is a fire? These homes are "sold" on an assured tenancy, so the capital accumulated in a lifetime goes as rent to a property speculator, not passed on to one's children. And they are not nursing homes. No promise is made of medical support beyond the most superficial provision of call systems in most such blocks. I understand that at extremis one is sometimes expected to move out of such properties. Nor is there much car parking available, although a paid car park for visitors can be seen at Image That said, the properties themselves are described as luxurious, and if I recall the almshouses that used to be provided for the elderly that cannot be denied. The design is a modern one, but sympathetically uses the red brick that was used throughout the former industrial buildings on the site, and has some continuity of texture, if not form, with the rest of the town.

This is the collection of Chimneypots seen in the distance in Image A pleasing miscellany, including a strange type of stack I have never seen before, with an aperture rather than a pot, filled with mesh to deter birds from nesting.