(In the Appreciation as "Barn next to 19 Market Street")
(Recommended in the Appreciation for Grade II listing)
(Recommended in the Appreciation for Grade II listing)
At the end of the fishing season in October or November, the Arnolds' business turned over to logging, with a large circular saw in the middle of the little building and a kindling store in the far corner. It wasn't until 1994 that the barn was turned into a busy general store, a shop that is not only "open all hours", but became more and more versatile over the years, adding a video library, daily and weekly newspapers and magazines, and a hole-in-the-wall machine to its services. In 2005, the owners sold on the business for a well-earned semi-retirement, and it has changed hands twice since then.
Chapel Lane Stores has to be one of the more dramatic "change-of-use" planning permissions in recent years. At the time of the Appreciation, it was a net store and loggers' workshop. The picture on the right, reproduced from "The Seiners and the Knocker-up" by Cyril Toms, shows the building some time in the 19th century. The Arnold family (the last of the many crews that once worked commercially at mackerel fishing) stored the nets they used in seine fishing off Chesil Beach, an arduous process evocatively described in Cyril Toms' book, now unfortunately out of print.
There is a precedent for businesses here in this lane. The directory for 1871 lists Joseph Symes the tailor and John Walls the bootmaker operating from Chapel Lane. The tailor was still here when the 1875 directory was published, and the directories for 1889 and 1903 both list John Limm as a shopkeeper in Chapel Lane ~ but the 1889 Ordnance Survey map doesn't show the cottages that once stood at right angles to Chapel Lane, near the present garages. Only the photo, left, from Dave Stevens' collection, records their existence.
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