| Admin History | The Jesse family contributed largely to the development of Victorian and Edwardian Reading, with three generations (passing from uncle to nephew each time) of major building developers. The family appears to have originated in Wiltshire. The first Jesse to make a mark in Reading was Thomas (born in c.1763). He died in 1847, leaving as his heirs his daughters Christiana Isabella (1790-1857) and Anna Maria (c.1792-1869), and his nephew Thomas Jesse junior (1795-1879), who had married his cousin Anna Maria in 1832, and succeeded his uncle and father-in-law as an active builder and developer. Christiana did not marry.
Anna Maria was almost 40 at the time of her marriage, and she and Thomas junior had only one child, Christiana Maria (1833-1861). In 1861 the family were living at Castle Hill House, then numbered 78 Castle Street, on the north side of Castle Street, next to Upper Jesse Place. In 1871 the widowed Thomas was living in part of Castle Hill House only, alone with a servant. Christiana Maria never married, and Thomas took his nephew Edwin John Springbett Jesse (1842-1921), as his partner, in approximately 1871. Edwin continued the business after his uncle's death.
Edwin John Springbett Jesse was born in North Newnton, Wiltshire, in 1842. His father died in 1844, and his mother Sarah Sophia, nee Springbett, remarried in 1863. As a young man in the 1860s he seems to have worked with a Springbett relative at Wilsford Mill, near Pewsey, Wiltshire. At the time of the 1871 census (just before joining his uncle in Reading) Edwin was visiting friends in Somerset and although then only 28 was described as a retired miller. He married Harriett Clements Sims (c.1850-1921), daughter of Reading brewer William Sims, in 1878. The couple lived at Castle Hill House (described on census returns as 154 Castle Hill) from the 1870s until c.1901, when he built a fine new house as his own residence, Avenue House, Upper Warren Avenue, Mapledurham. Edwin and Harriet both died in 1921.
Areas developed by the Jesses were laid out in new streets, and the building plots were then either sold empty for the purchaser to build his own house, or had a house erected thereon. Houses were sold where possible, or rented out if sales were slow. Areas they developed included Jesse Terrace and Jesse Place, Reading; the area at the top of Castle Hill, Reading, surrounding Yeomanry House; the Elm Park and Whitley Rise estates in south Reading; the Caversham Heights, Priest Hill and Rosehill estates in Caversham; and the Warren estate in Mapledurham, Oxfordshire. Little if any new building was carried out after the First World War, and the estate concentrated on renting out existing properties. |