To be published: 2026.
A4 size c. 200 page paperback.
Numerous black and white and coloured illustrations.
ISBN13: 914310-10-2. Price: c. £30
For two hundred years or so, from the latter part of sixteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, Gainsborough House and its surrounding buildings served as Dorset’s bridewell. For more than a hundred years before that, it had been associated with Sherborne’s Benedictine monastery, probably as the vicarage or priest’s house of St David’s chapel, and for one hundred and fifty years after ceasing to be a bridewell it was a range of things — a brewery; home to the Sherborne Journal; a Sherborne School boarding house; a dentist’s; a garage; and an antiques business. Now the old Bridewell serves to provide comfortable homes for several families.
As well as the full story of these developments, much of it based on an architectural assessment, this house history contains many transcriptions from original documents, primarily from the Dorset Quarter Sessions Order Books, but also the complete transcription of the surviving property deeds from 1794 to 1918, and an analysis of the modern deeds.