Lady Hutchinson's House, 23, High Pavement

Lady Hutchinson's House, 23, Low Pavement

The older amongst us know this house as "The Judges’ Lodgings,’’ for it was used for many years for the entertainment of his Majesty’s judges. Now it forms part of the administrative offices of the Nottinghamshire County Council.

But its history is as interesting as its interior is beautiful, and few folk are aware that behind it is a quiet garden, an oasis of greenery in the wilderness of bricks and mortar forming the neighbourhood.

The house appears to have been built during the seventeenth century, probably just before the Civil War. It was occupied in 1646 by Lady Hutchinson, mother of the great Colonel Hutchinson.

One gets some idea of the absurd tyranny that obtained during the Commonwealth when one remembers that this good lady, despite her own known opinions and her son’s great services to the Parliamentarian cause, was prosecuted at the Assizes for permitting music in her house on the Sabbath Day.

The front of the house was greatly altered about 1833, when it was purchased by the eminent banking family of Fellows. Heretofore the Fellows family had lived at 17 and 19, High Pavement, and the initials F.S.M,, dating from 1731, can still be seen on the rain-water heads of the fall pipes of these houses.

Some of the lower rooms of Lady Hutchinson’s house are beautifully panelled, and contain historic treasures such as the fragments of the drums that beat the charge for the Duke of Kingston’s Light Horse at Culloden in 1746, when " Bonnie Prince Charlie was overthrown, and the Jacobite cause went down in a welter of bloodshed.