Barkham Street, Wainfleet All Saints, Lincolnshire.

Grade II-listed Barkham Street in Wainfleet (population 2000) is a street o f19 houses in the early Victorian style. In the 18th century, much of Wainfleet, an agricultural town serving many farms, was owned by Sir Edward Barkham, of the East India Company, to whom there are local memorials. On Sir Edward's death, his estates were transferred to the Bethlehem Royal Hospital, in London, to whose trustees tenants paid their rent. However, in the 1840s, some of the Wainfleet properties were in poor repair and the tenants asked to be rehoused. The consulting architect to the Bethlehem Hospital was the respected designer Sydney Smirke. Smirke, son of the celebrated illustrator Robert Smirke, had learnt his craft as a pupil of his famous brother Sir Robert Smirke.Sir Robert, who moved in the most illustrious circles, is best remembered for London's General Post Office in St Martin's-le-Grand and for the British Museum, the façade of which was completed in 1847. It was in that year that his brother Sydney was asked by the Bethlehem trustees to attend to the needs of their tenants in Wainfleet. It is possible that Sydney Smirke had never heard of Wainfleet and, imagining that land there was at as much of a premium as land in the capital, designed a street to fit his normal Bethlehem briefs. A firm of builders in Hull - Forman and Frow - was commissioned to build the street exactly to Smirke's plans and so a London street identical to any on the Bethlehem Estates, was erected in deepest Lincolnshire.