Noells Almshouses and attached boundary wall

In Stafford.
That’s what it says on the listed buildings record.
I’m going do Google it a bit more later as it was new to me (or maybe I’d just forgotten)

The current mess and traffic chaos is also fairly new to me. It was confusing, ugly, dug up and hard to negotiate.

As a Uttoxeter girl, Stafford was our county town, revered and with historic interest, although we only went to use the station, or the record office for  family history. We all knew the County Showground on the outskirts well, because of the County Show and Midland Counties Championship Dog Show. But we used to go into Derby or Hanley for shopping. 

I had to go into Stafford town centre to rescue my oldest building society account. 

I hadn’t paid in or taken out any money for over 15 years so they wanted to take the contents, (they call it the Reclaim fund). I had a limited time to stop them. Apparently I could do it all by post but you can’t send any original documents and you have to get things “certified”.

There’s a list of who can do this. It includes bank officials (but my bank have a policy of not doing it.)  It includes doctors (I’m sure our doctors haven’t time for this when they can’t see their patients.)

Anyway, I went in to The Co-operative Bank who are dealing with this on behalf of Britannia as it’s now called. It used to be the Leek and Moreland building Society (And I think it was just Leek Building Society in my granny’s day.)

It was understaffed and looked really run down, but the cashier who rescued my money for me was so helpful and lovely. I then had to run the gauntlet of the queues and traffic holdups to get home.

Now, I’m looking forward to finding out more about those intriguing almshouses……