penn villa
penn villa
Home and Surgery of two pioneering dentists
In
1886 Penn Villa,
a large
residence in
extensive
grounds, was the
only dwelling on
the eastern side
of Pen Hill. Its
gardens went
almost to the
junction of Pen
Hill with
South
Street and to
the north it
backed onto
South Street
School. To its
southeast in
1886 were
extensive
orchards.
It is a villa built about 1840, built of rendered and colour-washed brick under a hipped Welsh slated roof with wide soffits. It has a two storey facade of three bays with a central projecting porch having square non-classical columns and pilasters with conventional entablature, all in colour-washed stone but having the sides filled in with margined windows. Fenestration is plain sashes without glazing bars to the ground floor and three 12-pane windows with Regency style margined sash windows to the first floor, all in plain openings. There are several early twentieth century extensions to the south and rear including angled bay windows with a balcony.
In the 1881 census 69-year old dentist William Hunt was in residence with his spinster daughters Sarah and Elizabeth, dentist son William Alfred, and two servants.
William Hunt first used ether as a dental anaesthetic in this house at Christmas 1847, a year after its first European use by London surgeon James Robinson. Hunt's son, William Hunt junior, published the earliest English paper on the use of hypodermic injection of cocaine as a local anaesthetic in 1886. Their house is still a dental surgery more than a century and a half later. A millennium plaque, illustrated above, celebrates the Hunts.
map
Map based on the
1886 Ordnance
Survey showing
South Street at
top, Penn Hill
running
diagonally
across the lower
left and Penn
Villa at Centre.
gallery
Penn Villa, elevation to Penn Hill. Note the typically Regency style margined windows of the first floor. Photographed in 2013.
The porch to Penn Villa with its side windows with marginal lights - a surviving Regency architectural feature. Photographed in 2013.
The following series of internal views of an upstairs flat in Penn Villa were taken in 2009 and are reproduced here courtesy of Matt Bullock.
