Just off the busy A4173 Stroud Road as it runs through Tuffley, a mostly 50's suburb of Gloucester, hidden amongst the the tall trees of Robinswood Hill, one might glimpse a dilapidated, ancient looking building, falling apart before your very eyes. It is easily missed and seems to retreat into its surroundings, as if ashamed of its current state, and yet, it sticks out like a sore thumb situated as it is between well-kept modern properties. This long-suffering house has captivated my imagination ever since I first saw it aged 7 over 12 years ago; a formerly large and beautiful cottage epitomising the romanticised idyll of old rural England, abandoned and neglected for years upon years and left to rot alone while hemmed in by modern housing. This oasis of decay always prompted questions for me as a child: what's the story here? Maybe it was haunted. How could this have been allowed to happen? Again, maybe because of the ghosts. And most importantly, what next?

The property is thought to date from the early 17th century, originally having been built as a farmhouse before it was converted into several cottages sometime around the turn of the 19th century.¹ It was converted back into a single dwelling at the start of the 20th century, and was listed at Grade II on March 12th 1973 before being acquired by the nearby Knoll Care Home in 2000, since when it has been abandoned. In 2003 it received planning consent for conversion into two cottages, obviously to no avail, and was put onto the Gloucester City Council Buildings at Risk Register in 2005, where it remains to this day.²  The council seem to have tried to set the wheels in motion for its conservation in 2008, when it was reported in January that there was "ongoing dialogue with [the] owner for conservation work to commence"³ and it was decided in November that "it would be timely to look at this property to assess its condition",⁴  but 16 years on, not much appears to have changed for the better. Aside from the apparent long-standing indecision over whether or not it should be a single house, the building must contend with vandalism and structural issues, not to mention a complete lack of doors and windows, although the slate roof is surprisingly intact. When the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings reviewed the site in 2021, they found it to be surprisingly "pretty much dry and watertight throughout"⁵ (such glowing praise!), but at the time of writing in 2024, many of the boards have fallen from the windows leaving gaping holes for damp and the like to get in. The SPAB article from this review shows the building before the frustratingly opaque borders (though thankfully fitted with anti-climb paint) were placed around it sometime in 2021 and it contains an interior shot too, showing that the internal structure at least is (or was) still relatively sound. Further images with transparent fencing can be seen here and here.

So what's next for 333 Stroud Road? The 2003 conversion permission never seems to have gone anywhere, and given that the SPAB note that the Knoll Care Home "may be open to selling to a suitable and sympathetic owner for a nominal fee",⁶  it seems unlikely that the care home are particularly able to aid in transforming its future themselves at this point. As lovely as it could one day be after a heavy dose of TLC, at present it is an eyesore, especially for the care home as both properties are accessed by the same drive and I imagine that the average potential care home resident and their family would not exactly be enticed by passing an unkempt, derelict ruin in the front garden on their way to the actual home. As such, the Knoll are planning to "separate the cottage from the care home by way of the creation of a new access which would enable the sale of the property as freehold with a useful plot of ground and its own access",⁷ which would enable a buyer to potentially pick up the 2003 idea for conversion again. Unfortunately, any potential buyer would have a daunting task ahead of them; windows and doors to be replaced, nogging to be filled in, timber frames to be repaired and reinforced, rubble infill to be consolidated, rendering to be reapplied, all to be completed within the parameters of listed building consent, and even then, the end result is an empty shell of a building, albeit one less likely to collapse at a passer-by's sneeze. Is it likely that anyone would take the financial risk? At any rate, three years after the SPAB article citing the care home's plan to create a new access, nothing has been done to this effect and the site's condition has only gotten worse.

I have gratifyingly made it to this point in the discussion without using the d-word, by which I of course mean demolition. I don't like to entertain it as an option, but it's hardly an unlikely future path with the building in the state that it is, despite being listed. The worst case (and most cynical) scenario would be every involved party waiting, procrastinating, or filibustering until the building is so badly dilapidated that it can be demolished on safety grounds lest it practically demolishes itself, after which the land can be sold to a developer for a premium. How sad it would be, what a hole in the area's heritage it would leave if we were to lose this building, and with it the memories of everyone who ever lived within its walls. 400 years is a significant lifetime after all; the house would have seen England in turmoil during the Civil War, seen the Commonwealth, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution all play themselves out, seen the gradual industrialisation of the world, seen the births and deaths of countless kings, queens, poets, and peasants, been around for everything from the first powered flight to the moon landing to the invention of the smartphone. The people who lived inside it may have loved it, they may have hated it; they would have laughed and wept within its walls, eaten and slept by its warm hearth, lived out completely anonymous lifetimes that nobody will ever think about again. Maybe they were only there for a few weeks, or maybe they lived there their entire lives, but their names and faces and personalities are all lost to time and this house is all that we have left to remind us that they existed and that they mattered. How can we justify letting it slip through our fingers? Almost the entire area around it is composed of modern housing developments, and 333 Stroud Road is one of the few reminders in the built environment of the footsteps in which we follow. I hope that a solution can be found whereby this building continues to memorialise the forgotten average people who came before us, and continues to inspire children's imaginations.

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