List entry for 6 St Andrew's Lane: 1100600

Now known as Pumpkin Cottage, this house dates from the seventeenth century. It was held under the Manor of Heddington, and is described in the early Court Rolls as “a messuage or tenement, yard, orchard, garden ground, backside and buildings”.

John Clements conveyed the copyhold of this cottage to George Smith, carpenter, in 1758, when it was described as being “late in the occupation of Widow Bolt”. Smith died in 1766, and the next year it was inherited by his daughter Mrs Martha Pancutt and her husband Richard. At this time it was occupied by John Snow.

Richard Pancutt died in 1803 and Pumpkin Cottage was inherited by his son, another Richard, who passed it on to his half sister, Mrs Martha Bateman and her husband Robert, a carpenter. They lived in the house an had nine children baptised at St Andrew’s church between 1803 and 1818. They were both still living in St Andrew’s Lane (then called Church Lane) at the time of the 1841 census; and Robert Bateman was still there in 1851, a widower of 72 living with his 8-year-old granddaughter Eliza. The Headington Rent-Book of 1850 shows the house as both owned and occupied by Robert Bateman: its rateable value was then £6–10-0, and its gross estimated rental £9-0-0.

In 1852 Robert Bateman sold the house for £160 to John Bateman, a grocer of Oxford who may have been his first cousin. John lived in the house for only five years, as he died in 1857, and it was then let out to William Jeffs. It was then inherited by John Thomas Bedford aka Bateman, the only surviving child of Sarah Bedford deceased. In 1897 it was enfranchised for £4 by J. T. B. Bateman of 33 Ashbourne Grove, East Dulwich: it had been rented since 1890 by Walter Metcalfe, a young gardener’s labourer, at a rent of five shillings a week. The 1891 census shows Metcalfe, a bachelor of 21, living in Pumpkin Cottage with his blind father, his charwoman mother, and two child boarders.

The 1911 census shows William Louch (59), a carpenter, living at Pumpkin Cottage with his wife Ellen (57), who was a laundress working from home, and their son Jesse (24) who was a house painter, and Harold (21), a general labourer. Jesse Louch died in the first world war, and his father in 1926. Mrs Ellen Louch (below) remained at the cottage until her death there at the age of 80 in 1935, and is listed as the occupant in Kelly's Directory up until 1935.

Ellen Louch had had a hard life: she was baptised at St Andrew’s Church on 7 June 1854, the illegitimate daughter of Anne Gardiner. On 6 June 1876 she married the labourer Thomas Soanes at St Andrew’s Church, and their son William was baptised there four months later. Just four months after his birth, Ellen’s first husband committed suicide in the garden of his New High Street house. Ellen then married a young widower, the carpenter William Louch, at St Andrew’s Church on 27 December 1879, and had another eight children. At the time of the 1891 census the Louches were living in New High Street , and in 1901 at Stafford Terrace in Old Headington. Mrs Louch made ends meet by taking in washing. She was still listed here (as Mrs Helen Louch) in Kelly's Directory for 1935, but she died at the age of 80 at the beginning of that year.

From 1936 to 1945 the house was occupied by Miss M. A. B. Bateman. In 1945 and 1947 by Herbert George Hedges; in 1949 by Patrick Henry Coates; in 1952 by Peter James Spicer; and in 1954 by Miss Catherine M. Gilbert.

In about 1955 Church Lane was given the new name of St Andrew's Lane.

Mrs G. L. Aldous lived here from at least 1958 to 1976.