In the May 2024 Historic Melton article, I looked at the story of the Old Vicarage, Seedsfield Hosue on Leicester Road.
Compared to other areas in town, Leicester Road was quite late in being developed with West End Villas, a pair of three-story semi-detached villas, opposite Aldi car park being the first houses to be built around 1880.
The builder, Robert Weaver, lived in one of them with his wife Dorothy, and the other was occupied by Rev Joseph Twidale and his wife Catharine, of the Baptist Church, now the United Reformed Church.
The lake behind the villas, and what is now a vehicle storage yard, is known as Weaver’s Lake and was most probably dug to provide earth for the railway embankment running across the bottom of the grounds.
A few years later in the late 1880s, a new property known as Seedsfield house was erected on Leicester Road and this was built for Joseph Dickinson, a pork pie & cheese producer.
Only a few years earlier, Joseph had submitted a claim for injury to his seeds field. The claim was made up of two items: the award of his valuer, £2 10s and 15s for man’s time rolling and seeding down the portion damaged. Maybe the house was built on that very field, hence the name.
No more houses were built on Leicester Road until the 1930s when the Melton Urban District Council built the Lake Terrace estate. Around the same time, the owners of Seedsfield House had decided to build a smaller more modern property on vacant land next door and in the late 1930s, a new Seedsfield House was built.
Consequently, the old Seedsfield House was put up for sale and purchased by the St Mary’s Church for use as a vicarage. The first vicar to take up residence was the Rev Canon Harold Bates and his wife, who moved from the original vicarage (Blakeney Institute) opposite St Mary’s Church.
Harold Bates was the vicar at St Mary’s from 1937 until he died in 1945. He was a veteran of WW1 and helped the Reverend Tubby Clayton set up Talbot House, Toc-H in Poperinge Belgium. During WW2, Harold could quite often be seen at night patrolling around his beloved St Mary’s.
In 1962, the Church purchased a new property at 67 Dalby Road for use as a new vicarage, resulting in Seedsfield House being sold off and becoming known as The Old Vicarage.
