The Gables Yard is a complex of five crafts workshops & studios carefully converted from Victorian outbuildings behind one of the houses overlooking the village green in Pulham Market in South Norfolk.
The owners take great pride in keeping the buildings and yard well maintained and secure, thus providing an ideal environment in which design/craft orientated businesses can develop and benefit from working in a friendly and creative atmosphere.
For around 100 years The Gables and its extensive range of outbuildings was home to a thriving butcher’s business run by the Outlaw and later the Culham families. The buildings which now form The Gables Yard were then a gig house, washhouse and grooms’ flat (now Workshop 1), a cutting and freezer room (Workshop 2), a slaughterhouse (Workshop 3), a stable and forge (Workshop 4) and a stable and tack room (Workshop 5).
In 1970 The Gables was bought by Arthur Smith and his wife Gladys (Chuck). Helped by their daughter and her husband, Pat and Simon Whiteside, they converted the slaughterhouse into a workshop. Here Arthur established an antique furniture restoration business, The Gables Workshop. Later Chuck and Pat ran an antique business, The Gables Antiques, in the former butchers’ shop.
Following Chuck’s death in 1984 Arthur, Pat and Simon together with friends Isobel and Ray Auker converted the gig room into Workshop 1 for Isobel’s knitwear design business. Later they converted Workshop 2 for decorative woodworker Peter Roy. After Arthur’s death in 1989 Pat and Simon converted the remaining two buildings and The Gables Yard was established. Great care was taken to retain the original character of each building as well as the yard itself, and in 1991 the conservation received a Norfolk Society award.