Bridgegate
including Bridge Street, New Zealand Yard & Red Lion Yard
Bridgegate runs from All Saints Square down towards the Rotherham (Chantry) Bridge. There are no buildings of great architectural note on Bridgegate now - a few pubs remain - The Angel, The Rhinoceros and The County (not a pub to be entered lightly) but I know nothing of the history of these.
Bridgegate was, for a long time, the snob end of the town, up to the 19th Century any road. The house of the Steward to the Lord of the Manor was here and this was a solidly built edifice used at times as a prison and also a lodging for visiting nobs. There is one surviving 18th Century building on Bridgegate at Number 31 which I believe is now a furniture shop. This was called Buck House (no not THAT Buck House) and was the home of the Buck family, prominent lawyers about town. The Hastings Furniture shop occupied Numbers 31 - 37, then 35 - 37 before it closed in the town centre in 1982.
At the top corner of Bridgegate where it adjoins All Saints Square are these mock Tudor buildings. I could be wrong here, but I believe that these were built in the 1920s to replace something very similar but decrepit. At one time this was known as Sheffield House. The entrance to the Red Lion Yard is on the right.
Further down Bridgegate there was until about 30 years ago a row of early Georgian houses. Very handsome houses they were, with Grade II listing and I understand that there were Elizabethan kitchens in some of them. When built the houses had been very posh with gardens and stables to the rear. In the 19th Century when development land in the centre of town was at a premium the gardens and stables were developed into "yards" - cheaply built, very nasty accommodation where a whole family often lived in one room, e.g. Russums Yard, New Zealand Yard. The latter still exists as the loading bay for the modern development. The houses were let as shops or warehouses and by the 1960s were in a poor state or repairs. There was a disastrous fire - if I remember correctly, in the kitchen of Mick's café (in part Elizabethan). The rest of the terrace was badly smoke-damaged and despite many protests down they all came to make way for new development.
The Cascades Centre was built around three side of a square along Bridgegate, Frederick Street and Howard Street with a large loading yard (New Zealand Yard behind) and is a modern unprepossessing building.
At the bottom of Bridgegate you turn west into Bridge Street. The road crosses Rotherham Bridge also known as Chantry Bridge because of the chantry Chapel of Our Lady which is part of the bridge. The original bridge was built in the 1480s of Rotherham Red Sandstone. It has been subject to to alteration and restoration over the centuries and is now virtually obscured by the new bridge built 1930 for 20th Century traffic.
You can get the best view by crossing the bridge and doing a right by The Bridge Inn, past Rotherham Trades Club and into the Trades Club car park. More about the Chapel of Our Lady at Tourism - In & Around Rotherham -The Chapel of Our Lady on Rotherham Bridge. The Bridge Inn looks like an old building but it is not. I believe it was built in the 1930s to resemble the ramshackle building it was replacing.
New Zealand Yard off Bridgegate is the loading yard for the buildings on the four surrounding sides. At one time Rotherham was full of 'yards' often full of nasty, crowded, insanitary tenements. Most of them were demolished during the various slum clearance programmes or road widening schemes. This is the last remnant of them though nowadays it is more likely to be full of lorries.
The Red Lion Yard is a cut through from the top of Bridgegate onto Effingham Street. The Red Lion Public House has been closed for some time but a new café has opened next door in 2007 (My usual complaint: the tea is very, very weak.) The area was once the gardens of the College of Jesus, also known as the Imp Yard, but this has been wholly obliterated by later, very horrid developments. I can't lay my hand on the book at the moment to confirm the details but I believe that there has been a tavern on this site for at least two and a half centuries (and possibly longer) but not this building by the look of it. It has been closed and boarded up for a while though from time time to time it looks as if something is being done it has not yet re-opened.