Historic ‘Free’s Door’, between Greggs and Crew now restored and rehung

One of the lesser known but important original features of Marlborough’s High Street has nestled for many years between two shops which are now Greggs and Crew. This is ‘Free’s Door’, which, with support from the Marlborough History Society, and the keen skills of Andrew Brennan, who removed the door to perform the renovation needed at his workshop in Burbage, has been re-hung, now back in its longtime location between 104 and 105 High Street.

The door is at the entrance to a passage that leads into the back of Hughenden Yard. This was originally the stone yard of the Free family, and Hughenden is from where they originally came, arriving in Marlborough, attracted by the sheer quantity of relatively unusual sarsen stone that this area offered. The Free family were masons, and builders, and it is they who created the beautiful buildings of 104 to 107 fronting on to the High Street.

As Marlborough historian David Chandler explains, Sarsen Stone is a very dense and hard rock which used to exist in profusion on the Marlborough Downs. It still does in some areas, in Lockeridge (the Dene) and in the ‘valley of stones’ on Fyfield Downs. But much of it was dug, cut, dressed and used for buildings, or crushed to make the foundations for many of the roads around here.

The door was created nearly one hundred years ago by Jack Rawlings, a cabinet maker craftsman, who was employed by Free family. As well as stone masons, the Free family specialised in cabinet making, building and other trades, later road contracting from their yard which was formerly the old station where the Savernake View care Home now resides. From the mid-nineteenth Century through to the mid twentieth, the Free family were key members of Marlborough society.

The beautiful door: it comprises twelve carved panels which have royal and civic themes. One panel on the door has Masonic symbols and another  has the legend of the cat who saved her kittens from the Great Fire of Marlborough of 1653.

This door acts as a mark of the Free family on Marlborough, along with Frees Avenue (adjacent to The Common, the road leading out towards Rockley) and Thomas and Eric, both six time Mayors of Marlborough.

Now restored, and in place for another century, maybe.