Sat between one of Gloucester’s oldest existing buildings and a monument to the city’s regeneration, Gloucester’s old fire station is something of a contradiction. Now home to Moose Marketing and PR the producers of Punchline-Gloucester.com, the building built as a fire station is more than 100 years old. Constructed in 1912 and externally unaltered since, it’s a quirk of fate that it has spent less than half of its life as a home for fire engines and fire fighters. It sits on a parcel of land between the Roman gate streets that form Gloucester’s city centre and what used to be Gloucester Castle. Up until the mid-18th century, the land between Westgate Street and the castle – which later became Gloucester’s Gaol – was meadlowland. It wasn’t until 1740 that the firstmajor building appeared on what is now Longsmith Street and Bearland. Gloucester-based attorney William Morris built Bearland House in the mid-part of the 18th century as a home for him and his mother. The building still stands today and is home to luxury meanswear designer and manufacturer EmmaWillis. But while the external look of the building is identical to what Mr Morris constructed in the 1700s, the view The history of Gloucester’s Old Fire Station
is markedly different to what he and his mother looked out upon. At that time, Bearland House was the only building of any prominence south of the city centre Then came the industrial revolution. Two significant developments around the turn of the 19th century led to the city’s landscape being transformed forever. Britain became an increasingly penal country in the 1790s. Those people not transported to the mother prisons in the newAustralian colony were banged up at home. Gloucester Gaol was expanded beyond all recognition to become Gloucester Prison to keep up with the demands from magistrates who were keen
120 | February 2020 | www. punchline-gloucester .com
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