In 1977, the owners of numbers 1 All Saints Street and 5 and 6 Church Lane applied for permission to demolish them. 1 All Saints Street had been a butcher’s shop and the properties in Church Lane were adjoining cottages. They were extremely dilapidated but they were Grade II listed. The West Norfolk District Council refused permission and the owners appealed to the Department of the Environment. At the public enquiry which followed, the King’s Lynn Preservation Trust and others gave evidence in support of the Council’s case and the appeal was dismissed. The Trust subsequently purchased the properties in order to restore them.
Complete restoration was carried out with the assistance of grants and loans. It was agreed that all three units should have residential use and on completion, the houses were sold on.
Although of no great architectural significance, these early 19th-century houses are representative of the buildings that served and accommodated the vast majority of the town’s population.
Because of their position, grouping and shape, the three buildings are also extremely important elements in the street scene at the narrow entrance of the lane leading out of South Lynn Plain to All Saints Church.
All Saints Church and with it the community it served were already in existence when St Margaret’s Church was founded in about 1100. South Lynn remained a separate community until the mid-16th century, when it was incorporated into King’s Lynn. All Saints Street lay on the historic route from the South Gates to the centre of the town and remained so until the building of London Road in the early 19th century.
Like the Pilot Street houses in the north of the town, these cottages stood in a part of Lynn where extensive demolition and redevelopment in the 1960s had completely changed the character of the area. The Trust felt it important to retain as many of the remaining houses as possible as markers of the medieval town.
