Tower and Town, July 2017

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The Old Boathouse, Waitrose Car Park

Do you wonder why places have the names they do? Some house names intrigue me as they bear little obvious relationship to the house. I remember as a teenager living near Henley-on-Thames. A house down the road was called ‘Sea View’. One could hardly have been further from the sea! We are often asked about our name at Mustard Seed and the history of the building. From what we have heard, the building now housing Mustard Seed was the boathouse on the river for the large house that was where Waitrose now is. The car park was the garden of the house and The Old Boathouse was exactly that. So under the flagstone floor is water. Sometime in the first half of the last century a cinema was built on the site of the house – my husband remembers it being there – and the boathouse became overgrown and fell into ruins. A year or so ago we had a customer who had grown up in Marlborough and remembered how that area looked when he was a child. He remembers playing there and climbing an old wooden ladder inside the building. He sent us a photo taken in 1986, the year before Tom Seaman renovated the boathouse. Waitrose had opened in 1977 and with the car park there was an opportunity to ‘do’ something with the ruined boathouse. Tom sold the building as a shop and for a number of years it was a dolls house shop. We still have people arriving expecting to find dolls house furniture. Mustard Seed moved in in 1997.

Rachel Rosedale