Danny Howell writes:
My mother’s youngest sister, Pat (Patricia Norah Ball) married James Boyle in 1958. Pat was brought up in the Church of England faith but Jimmy was Irish, so they were married at St. George’s Catholic Church, Boreham Road, Warminster.
I don’t know if it was their first home but soon after marrying, Pat and Jimmy were living at Three Horseshoes Yard, Warminster. There were about ten houses there and Pat and Jimmy lived at number nine. They wouldn’t have owned it; they would have been renting from someone. They were living there in the early 1960s for sure, certainly 1960 to 1961.
I can remember my mother (Gwen Howell) going to Three Horseshoes Yard to visit Pat. My mother would take me along too. I was only about five years old but I can remember it, albeit vaguely. I do know that mother and I would go down the Avenue and turn left through a gap in the wall. There was a path which connected the Avenue with the back of the Three Horseshoes pub in the Market Place. I have a feeling the path wasn’t surfaced, it was just a dirt surface that made its way through a neglected area from the Avenue end to where the houses of Three Horseshoes Yard were.
The houses looked old and somehow I recall they were a bit run-down. They had seen better days. What I do vividly remember is that one of the houses had a first floor that came out over the path. If you wanted to continue along the path to the pub end you had to walk under the top part of that house. That’s always stuck in my mind. I suppose that property had what was known as “a flying freehold.”
My aunt Pat and uncle Jimmy eventually moved out of the house at Three Horseshoes Yard, I guess it wasn’t suitable bearing in mind they were starting a family. They later lived at Boreham Road, near the entrance to Chancery Lane, prior to moving to Bristol.
By 1970, the houses at Three Horseshoes Yard were either derelict or demolished and I remember seeing that area having the appearance of an overgrown wasteland – clumps of brambles and tall weeds and the odd pile of rubble here and there. I was fourteen years old then. Three years later they built the Three Horseshoes Mall at the southern end and, of course, the northern end became a car park – all very different to what it was when I was a young boy.
